


Spacious Living and Housebreaking Strangers

by joliemariella



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: AU Crossover, Clonecest, F/M, Human AU, Human Horrortale bros, Human Quarantine Sans, Human Swapfell bros, Human Underfell bros, Human Underswap bros, Human Undertale bros, M/M, Multi, Not A Harem Fic, Skeleton OC, and younger brothers shipped with younger brothers, but no crossover between those two groups, i mean you'll see older brothers shippwied with older brothers, not really fontcest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-31
Updated: 2018-06-27
Packaged: 2019-05-16 11:30:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14810534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joliemariella/pseuds/joliemariella
Summary: Skeleton monster and inheritor of her family's ancestral mountain home, Arial thought things would be easier after she finally won the prolonged legal battle against her aunt and uncle for control of the property. Spoiler alert: they weren't. Not only was the manor in a terrible state of disrepair, but when she was finally able to visit the place for the first time, she found a pair of suspicious human brothers squatting in it. Despite humanity having returned to the surface from the Underground over a year ago, Arial had never had a chance to get close to one before... but after an accident with the strange machine the men were keeping in the basement, she suddenly found herself with a whole manor full of them, with some being more interested in getting to know her than others...





	1. Mind if I 'axe' what you're doing here?

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Skeleton Squatters and the Landlady](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9816140) by [Tyrant_Tortoise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyrant_Tortoise/pseuds/Tyrant_Tortoise). 



> **Please Read!** : Welcome to the new fic, guys! If you can't tell, this is very loosely based off of Tyrant_Tortoise's fic 'Skeleton Squatters and the Landlady'. I say 'very' for a reason, as besides the general starting premise, things are going to play out much differently. For one, **this is not a reverse/harem fic** , please check the story tags! For another, it is also not a self insert. Arial is basically a skeleton version of the Landlady, but writing her as a reader character just made no sense after I changed her species, so she got herself a name and a new identity XD Hope you guys give it a chance despite the change from second person writing to third. I've got a ton of fun shenanigans planned, so stick around!  
> Don't forget to follow me over at [jolie-in-the-underground](http://jolie-in-the-underground.tumblr.com/) on tumblr for updates and also art! I've already [done headshots](https://jolie-in-the-underground.tumblr.com/post/174400205155/youre-a-real-handful-kid-you-know-that) of most of the guys if you want to see what they look like!

The night was dark and terribly lonely as Arial guided her car down the narrow road, deep in unfamiliar mountain territory in search of something that  _ really  _ should have been easier to find than it was proving to be.

Honestly, just how did one misplace an entire  _ manor _ ? Surely, even in mountains such as the ones that loomed around her unseen in the darkness, it shouldn’t be so easy.

Out of habit the skeleton monster glanced up into her rear view mirror but could see nothing outside of the small halo of illumination cast by her head and tail lights. Just trees, bushes, a tall, lanky man in dark jeans and a red jacket-

Arial gave a start as her tired mind caught up with what her eyelights had seen and snapped her head around to glance in her side mirror in hopes of catching sight of the man but saw… nothing. She slowed her car and squinted, but where she would have sworn she’d seen a human a moment before, she saw only darkness and undisturbed underbrush.

“Jeeze,” she mumbled and yawned, jaw popping in the process as she rubbed at one eye socket. “Must be imagining things,” she muttered absently to herself as she turned down the radio she’d had blasting to help keep her awake into the wee hours and squinted into the dark in hopes of spotting the turnoff to her destination. 

There was, after all, nothing else around for  _ miles.  _ No way there was just some random guy walking around in the dark in the wee hours of the morning in the mountains, surely? The long drive and the culmination of months of stress and frustration finally getting resolved were probably the culprit. Maybe she  _ should  _ have stopped at that motel she’d passed an hour back. At that point, Arial was starting to think she’d been cocky thinking she could make it all the way out to the manor in one shot without someone to spell her from driving…

Granted, besides her aging parents, there wasn’t really anyone she  _ could  _ ask to go with her on her first trip out to the manor her grandfather had left her when he died over two years before. She had friends back in her hometown, of course, but they all had jobs and significant others, and Arial herself wasn’t sure exactly sure how long she was planning to stay at the manor for this first trip, so she hadn’t really felt comfortable asking.

Life out in the world had been more than a little interesting ever since humans had returned to the surface from their prison in the Underground a little over a year before, but all the crazy politics and social upheaval around the event hadn’t even begun to impact Arial’s life the way the legal battle over her grandfather’s will had.

His death, though not unexpected considering his great age, had taken his family by surprise. Not so much, though, as the fact that he had left his manor, their family’s ancestral home, to Arial, his only granddaughter. She was touched that he had thought so highly of her as to leave such an important piece of history in her care, but at the same time, she almost wished he hadn’t considering the drama that had ensued.

Her aunt and uncle had contested the will every way they could possibly think to do, and the result had been a legal battle that had spanned from the day after her grandfather’s funeral to last week when they’d finally thrown in the towel. Arial had seriously considered giving up and just letting them have the place, but when she’d overheard her aunt’s plan to tear the place down and erect a resort in its place, she’d known she couldn’t. While she’d never actually visited the manor, she knew that her grandfather had always dreamed of seeing the place restored to its former glory and added to the National Registry of Historic Places.

Arial just couldn’t betray her grandfather’s trust like that, not when she was certain he’d left the old place to her because he knew she was the most likely of his family to actually follow through on his wishes.

The skeleton monster sighed tiredly and straightened her back in her seat a little in an effort to stay awake, glad at least that it was all over and she’d finally been given the address to the manor. She’d tried to get it sooner so she could at least check the place out in the intervening years, but her aunt had managed to maneuver things so she couldn’t even do  _ that  _ much until the deed had officially been handed over.

A break in the treeline along the side of the road came into view and Arial put on the brakes, jerking forward at the suddenness of it before leaning over to get a better look. She grinned when she spotted the ancient looking mailbox with the building number on it at the end of the drive. It was off kilter on its base, looking as though maybe someone had hit it at some point, though considering how old it looked she figured it might just as easily have fallen over under its own weight.

She made a note to pick up a replacement back in town when she had a chance as she turned into the drive, moving slower now as it curved this way and that at an increasingly steep incline. Finally she broke through the treeline and arrived at the top of the hill, coming to a stop before the huge building and groaned at what she saw.

While there was no moon out that night and the sky was heavy with clouds, the light of her car’s headlights was more than enough to reveal the disrepair into which her ancestral home had fallen in the family’s absence. Furious, Arial kicked open her car door as it tried to jump back shut when she opened it a little too hard.

“Oh come on, are you kidding me!?” She demanded of the night, which gave no answer. Arial stormed forward, footsteps crunching loudly across the gravel beneath her boots until she reached the edge of the circle of light and stared accusingly up at the darkened manor.

She’d expected  _ some  _ level of maintenance would be needed to fix the place up, but this was far and away worse than what she’d thought to find. Apparently her aunt and uncle hadn’t been out to the place over the course of the legal proceedings, though in retrospect, she wasn’t surprised. They’d been planning to tear the place down, after all; she really should have seen this coming.

The monster’s anger died down as she heaved a sigh that lifted her narrow shoulders and dropped them lower than they’d been a moment before. Well, she was here, might as well grab her things and see if there was anywhere inside she could stay until morning when she’d be better able to assess the damage.

Thinking her trip might be shorter than she’d expected, Arial grabbed the duffel she’d packed for the trip, but left the food she’d brought along for later and headed inside. 

The huge, arched double doors were unlocked to her surprise, and swung open with an echoing squeal of rusted hinges under her fingers. She closed it behind her, but when she tried to lock it, she realized that the mechanism was broken. A quick examination of the knob with the light of her phone didn’t reveal if this was due to vandalism or not, but it put her on edge regardless and spurred her to throw the bolt.

At least that much worked.

The manor was even bigger than she’d expected, despite having seen the floor plans for it. The large, vaulted entryway in which she now stood was part of the central building, which had a wing on either side full of various bed chambers and other rooms. If she remembered correctly, though, the main den and library were there in the central section, as well as the master bedroom. Deciding to save exploration for after she’d gotten some sleep and there was daylight to see by, Arial made a beeline for the right wing of the manor where she was most certain there were at least a few bedrooms on the bottom floor. No point risking potentially dangerous stairs in the dark, after all.

It was unnerving, wandering through the mostly empty, echoing house by herself by the light of her phone, and she jumped more than once when a shadow or slumped suit of armor startled her. 

The skeleton tried the first door that she came to and found what looked to be a small parlor of some sort, its furniture all covered in white sheets to ward off the dust and gave everything a distinctly haunted feeling that sent a shiver up her spine. Arial closed the door again and kept going, skipping several doors until she’d rounded a corner into what looked to be the servants hall, figuring it was a likely enough place for a serviceable bedroom. 

Luckily, her guess paid off, and as she shone her phone’s flashlight around the room, she was able to make out a four poster bed and various other pieces of covered furniture. Everything seemed to be in decent repair, so she dropped her bag inside the door and began dragging the dust covers off of everything to expose antique wood surfaces, and even various ancient looking knick-knacks. The ensuing dust cloud made the skeleton sneeze and hurry to the window with the intent of opening it to let in some fresh air, though it proved more of a struggle than anticipated. 

As a monster, Arial had plenty of strength, but it was a task getting the window open without damaging it in the process. She managed eventually, though, and stepped back out into the hall to give the air a minute to clear, intent on finding the bathroom so she could brush her teeth before getting some much needed sleep.

Supposedly the house had its own well system, but who knew what kind of conditions the pipes might be-

A soft creak at the end of the hall made Arial’s head snap around on reflex, but she saw nothing and immediately huffed at her own jumpiness. Honestly, a building as old as her ancestral home was would probably creak at the slightest breeze, but it wasn’t  _ haunted _ ... Shaking her head, the skeleton tried the door down the hall from hers and was relieved to find a bathroom within. Before she could even step inside to try the sink, however, the shadows at the end of the hall shifted in the periphery of her vision, making her go still.

There was nothing around her that should have made the light shift the way it had, and yet it  _ definitely  _ had… hadn’t it?

Soul fluttering with panic behind her ribs, Arial called out, “H-hello?” She cursed her nervous stammer and forced a little more confidence into her tone as she continued, “This is private property, you know; you shouldn’t be here!”, but received no answer.

There wasn’t  _ actually  _ anyone actually there, surely?

Memory of the man she’d sworn she’d seen on the road less than a mile back returned to haunt her, though, and spurred her forward with a nervous energy that demanded movement. Mad though it seemed, Arial headed straight down the hall with her phone held out in front of her to expose any interloper that she might come across, though she had no idea what she’d do if she actually  _ found  _ someone.

Arial rounded the corner just in time to see a distant door swing shut on hinges that were much more well oiled than the ones she’d entered the house through, and her eye sockets went wide.

That could definitely have been the wind, right? Maybe the air pressure had shifted when she’d opened the window in the room she’d cleared and then… only just now made a door all the way around the corner swing shut…

Okay, now she was just being silly. Time to grab her bag and head back to the car and drive away. She could come back tomorrow with the local police to clear out whoever was lurking around the manor. This was  _ not  _ a horror movie, she  _ refused  _ to get killed by an axe murderer just because she was too dumb to know when to pack it in and get the hell out of Dodge.

Nodding to herself, Arial spun on heel and headed back the way she’d come, set on getting to her things as quickly as possible and leaving before cliches started popping up when she saw a shadow moving towards her down the hall. If she’d had a heart it would have stopped dead in her chest, but as it was, her eyelights shrank to terrified pinpricks as she whipped her phone up and shone a light on the figure advancing towards her at a frightening pace.

It was a man; tall and lanky, wearing a red coat and carrying a long handled axe in one hand, his angular features cast in deep shadows by the light of her phone as he closed the distance between them with long, deliberate steps.

A terrified shriek tore from Arial and she immediately turned right back around and fled down the hall at a run. Any other time she’d probably have been embarrassed by her reaction, but all alone in the mountains in an abandoned manor, every horror movie she’d ever watched came rushing back all at once and gave her feet wings.

Certain the strange, axe wielding man was on her heels, Arial yanked open the first door she came to then slammed it shut behind her and scrambled for the lock. Finding none, however, she took a step back… and into empty air. A second scream erupted from the skeleton as she fell and made a wild grab for something,  _ anything  _ to save her. One hand fetched up against a banister and latched on while the other flailed wildly and smacked into a wall, knocking her phone from her grip. It careened loudly down what proved to be a set of enclosed spiral stairs, bouncing several times before smashing against the wall and going completely dark.

Panicked and completely blind, Arial gripped the bannister tighter, then turn and hurried down the stairs, seeing no other choice considering the man pursuing her was likely to open the door at any moment and start swinging at her with that horrible axe of his…

With no light to guide her and panic nipping at her heels, it felt to Arial like she was running down the stairs for hours rather than a few moments, but eventually a faint light came into view from under a door at their end. Not caring who might be waiting for her beyond, she threw it open and slammed it behind her. This time, at least, there was a lock, which she engaged and stepped hurriedly away again out of fear that the man chasing her might burst straight through the door.

Still frightened but able to think a little more clearly, Arial looked around and finally registered the fact that there were electric lights on in the room she’d found herself in. It shouldn’t have been possible, considering the power had been turned off ages ago according to the paperwork she’d gotten, and the power company wasn’t scheduled to turn it back on for another few days yet.

The second thing Arial noticed was the tremendous machine that dominated the center of the room.

She could not even begin to determine what it did, but it had a strange, almost cobbled together look to it in some places while seeming painstakingly precise in others. The skeleton noticed with some annoyance, despite her rather grave situation, that it had a large metal hose of some sort running from one side and up through the ceiling, no doubt into one of the rooms above. To the right of the construct was a curved glass barrier that surrounded a metal platform, and it was around this that she hurried as she heard footsteps nearing the base of the staircase on the other side of the door.

Arial crouched behind the machine as the axe wielding man tried the door and found it locked. Feeling panicked, the skeleton searched the back of the machine, wondering if perhaps it was a generator of some sort that was providing energy to the rest of the room. If she could turn off the lights, maybe she could sneak around the man and back up the stairs, then make it out to her car without him even noticing? If not that, then she had no idea how she was about to make it out in one piece. From her quick look around she hadn’t seen any other exits but the one she had come through…

It was a thought that made her feel sick in her soul. 

Growing desperate, Arial shuffled towards the other side of the machine, squeezing past a pile of what looked to be spare parts, and she could have cried when she spotted a promising looking switch. Maybe if she just-

“Don’t  _ flip  _ or anything, kid, but it’d be real regrettable if you turned that thing on, trust me.”

Arial jerked around with a gasp, knocking herself off balance with the suddenness of it. The only thing that stopped her falling forward onto the switch was a pair of strong hands that grabbed her by the shoulders and hauled her quickly away.

“Let me go!” she screamed and thrashed, shoving away from her accoster with all her considerable strength. The man flew backwards into a pile of boxes that crashed over on top of him, burying him in books and other debris.

“Sans?!” shouted a second voice from the other side of the door.

The man with the axe, Arial realised with a sickening drop of her soul as her eyelights darted to the man she’d just thrown aside like a ragdoll. There were two of them-

There was a crash at the door and the skeleton jumped backwards, plastering herself to the wall as it sprang open, frame splintering under the impact of the axe man’s boot.

He was  _ tall  _ for a human, she realized as he stepped into the light, eyes wide as he looked around the room and took in the scene, axe still in one hand. Almost six and a half feet tall with a wiry build, Arial suddenly wasn’t surprised he’d been able to take the door down so easily.

“S-Stay back!” the skeleton shouted, summoning her magic as the human’s dark eyes met her own and he blinked. “I don’t w-want to hurt you, just let me go, okay?”

Before he could speak, the other man groaned where he’d landed beneath his pile of books and junk, then forced himself to his feet, shedding paper right and left. “No one here’s hurt anyone but you, sweetheart,” he complained as he straightened and Arial was finally able to get a good look at him.

He was significantly shorter than his compatriot, though at just shy of six foot he still had almost six inches on Arial. Both humans had dark tan skin and brown hair just a few shades shy of black, though the taller’s beard was neatly trimmed to match his close cropped hair. The other’s hair was a veritable mop of curls and his beard was quite full and nowhere near so kempt. His build was as stocky and broad as the taller was lean, though despite their differences, they were uncannily similar in more ways than Arial could immediately place.

“I was just defending myself!” she objected, though a flush of green magic colored her cheekbones. “You grabbed me and he chased me with an axe!”

The skeleton still held her magic at the ready, but the lack of movement on both men’s part was enough to keep her from using it for the moment. They shared a look and she noticed the way the shorter human’s (Sans, she supposed, if what the other had shouted was anything to go by) eyes went to the axe in the other’s hand. He quirked one heavy brow while the taller man looked down at it with some surprise, as though he’d forgotten he had it.

“Oh, goodness, I am terribly sorry!” the tall human said, sounding genuinely horrified as he quickly put the axe down, leaning it against the wall just outside the now broken door before raising his hands before him. “That must have been frightening for you! I assure you that wasn’t my intention,” he continued, expression apologetic, demeanor exceedingly gentle, nothing at all like the shadowy demon she would have sworn he was a few minutes before.

“What were you even doing running about with an axe at this hour!” Arial couldn’t help but exclaim, feeling a little irritable in the wake of so much fear. Still, she allowed her magic to drop even as a chuckle escaped Sans.

“Oh, I was out getting some firewood,” the tall human said with a beneficent smile.

Arial just stared at him for a moment, then asked, “At four in the morning?”

“Absolutely,” he replied. “I always like to get an early start to my day!”

She kept staring while Sans waded out of the mess Arial had made when she’d thrown him and said, “Don’t bother kid, Pap’s always been an early bird. Can’t get him to stay in bed past three for love or money.”

She blinked at him, watching as he shoved his hands into the pockets of his battered blue hoodie. The skeleton couldn’t help but give him a once over, which revealed that he was also wearing a pair of gym shorts and… pink fuzzy slippers.

“What are you doing out here, kid?” he asked, dragging her attention back up to his face. He looked tired, with dark circles under his deep set eyes as he absently pushed at his messy mop of hair. 

The question was finally enough to drag the monster from her shock and she frowned, then planted her hands on her hips and asked, “What am  _ I  _ doing here? This is my family’s property! What are  _ you  _ doing here?!”

Sans went still and his eyes widened fractionally at this news, but he remained quiet long enough that the other man spoke first. 

“Well, I’m Papyrus, and this is my brother Sans,” he said, confirming Arial’s suspicions about the uncanny similarities they shared.

When he didn’t say more but looked at the skeleton expectantly, she flushed again and realized he expected her to introduce herself as well. Natural politeness kicked in and she automatically responded, “I’m Arial. I’d say it’s a pleasure, but...” she shrugged and laughed weakly. Papyrus smiled at her, blessed with social graces both his brother  _ and  _ she seemed to be lacking in at such an early hour.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I saw you wandering the halls and I was so surprised I just headed right for you!” Papyrus explained a little sheepishly. “We’ve never actually  _ seen  _ anyone out here before, you see,” he continued, gaze drifting to his brother, who sighed hugely and absently ran a hand through his hair.

“Let’s take this upstairs, huh? I need some coffee before I can wrap my head around all this,” Sans said, then turned and headed for the stairs without waiting for an answer.

Arial stared after him for a moment, and gave a small start when Papyrus gently touched her arm and smiled as he offered, “We have tea as well, if that’s your preference!”

“I-” she began, then stopped as she found herself being herded towards the stairs. Exhaustion finally catching up with her, the skeleton just nodded dumbly and let herself be guided. What else was she supposed to do? Talking  _ was  _ the best option, and why not do it over a warm drink? “Thanks,” she said finally. “Tea sounds good.”

Papyrus smiled at her, and Arial found herself smiling back.


	2. Contract void in case of paradox

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to chapter two, and major thanks to those of you that left a comment on chapter one! Cookies for you! The rest of you can let yourselves out, or at least make sure to leave a comment this time letting me know what your favorite part of the chapter was! I always love hearing that from my readers and it makes all this effort worthwhile XD
> 
> Don't forget to follow me over at [jolie-in-the-underground](https://jolie-in-the-underground.tumblr.com/) on tumblr for updates and also art! I've already [done headshots](https://jolie-in-the-underground.tumblr.com/post/174586199660/loyaltys-a-valuable-commodity-where-we-come) of most of the guys if you want to see what they look like!

While there had been electricity down in the basement, it turned out that didn’t extend to the kitchen upstairs. By the time Arial and Papyrus caught up to Sans, however, he had lit several candles, which helped dispel the distinctly creepy air that had loomed over the rest of the manor.

Unlike the bedroom Arial had dropped her duffel in, the kitchen was dust free and quite tidy. Despite the place’s age, it had all modern appliances, but Papyrus ignored them all in favor of an ancient looking, but well cared for, wood stove at one end of the room. She suspected it was original to the structure and had been left in place mostly for looks, but the two humans had clearly been making use of it full time in absence of the electricity needed to power the actual appliances.

Arial trailed after both humans, eyelights darting curiously around the room, taking in all the little details revealed by the soft glow of candlelight. From what she could tell, the room saw a lot of use and appeared to double as the main living area for the brothers. There was a table with two chairs to one side, and two worn looking lounge chairs drawn in close to the stove, no doubt to catch all the warmth they could in what was no doubt an incredibly drafty house.

“Have a seat, I’ll put the water on,” Papyrus said with an inviting smile as he waved her towards one of the two lounges. She only hesitated a moment before doing so while Sans dropped gracelessly into the other with a sigh. 

The silence between the two of them was awkward as Papyrus pottered around the place, stoking the stove and then filling a kettle from the nearby sink before putting it on one of the burners to heat.

“I see the water still works,” Arial said eventually in hopes of breaking the heavy silence that hung in the air between herself and Sans once Papyrus had gone off to the pantry to fetch the coffee and tea.

The human glanced at her sidelong, the shadows under his eyes even deeper in the gently flickering candlelight than they had been in the unforgiving flourescent light of the basement. “Yeah,” he replied after a moment, then sighed again and sagged back a little deeper into the cushions. “Pump’s gone down a few times since we moved in, but I’m good enough with machinery to get it goin’ again. It probably needs replacing, though.”

Arial hummed in response, not doubting that he was right. As she became lost in thought, the skeleton failed to notice that Sans continued to watch her even as his brother returned, a quiet, busy presence in the otherwise still room. 

She’d nearly given him a heart attack when he’d spied her in the East wing of the manor, a skeletal figure wandering through the halls in the dark of what he’d come to think of as his home. He’d always been a light sleeper, so the sound of someone coming in through the front door had woken him immediately. He and Papyrus had long since left off using the entrance in favor of the service door there in the kitchen that lead out into a small back garden Papyrus had been making use of. 

Big, drafty, and full of holes as the manor was, it just made sense to close up the majority of the place while they squatted in what had been the servant’s quarters of the once grand home. Sans wasn’t super familiar with the layouts of grand buildings such as this one, but he was pretty sure that the small series of rooms he and Papyrus had taken for themselves once belonged to the head butler and housekeeper, connected to the kitchen as they were.

They’d been living there for the better part of nine months and never encountered a single soul, which wasn’t entirely surprising considering the remoteness of the location. It was one of the reasons Sans had thought he’d struck gold when he’d found it. It was run down and clearly hadn’t been lived in for years, which had lead him to think it was abandoned… but now, here came the supposed owner to throw a wrench in all his plans.

“Sans,” Papyrus said, startling the man from his introspection as he offered him a steaming mug of coffee. 

“Thanks, bro,” Sans said with a wry twist of his lips as he accepted the drink and immediately busied himself taking a sip. 

Papyrus flashed him a smile then moved along to Arial and offered her a second mug with a tea bag floating in its depths.

“Thank you,” she said with a polite smile, to which Papyrus demurred and pulled over one of the chairs from their small dining table to join them around the fire with his own mug of tea.

The awkward silence returned as they all sipped their various drinks to the soft crackling of the fire in the stove. Eventually, unable to bear it anymore, Arial spoke again.

“So,” she began as she lowered her drink and cradled it in her thin, pale fingers. “I guess I should start with the obvious question and ask what it is you guys are doing in my family’s home.”

Papyrus looked to Sans, clearly expecting him to take the lead, and this didn’t go unnoticed by Arial, though she didn’t comment on it. Rather, she too looked to him for an explanation. His response, however, was to simply arch one heavy brow and shrug, saying, “Living, obviously. I mean, big house here for the taking, no one around to notice...”

Arial frowned, immediately not buying his nonchalant reply. “I’m not dumb, Sans,” she said, tone disapproving. “You’d have to really  _ look  _ to find this place, abandoned or not. We’re hours from any proper towns and the only amenity you have out here is running water, but even  _ that  _ goes down sometimes. No one picks that kind of lifestyle unless they’re hiding from something,” she accused.

Sans’ other brow went up at her assessment, and a low chuckle escaped him. From the way she’d been screaming and running about earlier, he’d assumed she was a bit of a wet blanket, but apparently she wasn’t afraid to call someone out once she was moderately sure they weren’t going to give her the axe.

“Well, you’ve got more  _ backbone  _ than I gave you credit for, kid,” he mused and took another sip of his coffee as a sound of disgust escaped Papyrus.

“Seriously, Sans?” he complained, then turned to Arial and said, “Please excuse my brother’s horrible sense of humor, he doesn’t mean anything by it.”

Arial snorted, but in the face of Papyrus’ earnest, apologetic smile, she couldn’t stay mad long. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t heard more than her fair share of skeleton related jokes over the years, after all. “It’s fine.”

The taller man’s smile widened and he said, “We’re not hiding, though, I promise. We just needed someplace out of the way for Sans to work on his machine and this place seemed perfect!”

Sans grimaced. He hadn’t yet decided how much he was willing to tell this stranger, but apparently Papyrus had decided to go all in, leaving him in a difficult position.

“That thing in the basement you didn’t want me to turn on?” Arial asked, brow furrowed as she glanced from one brother to another. “What does it do? Is it dangerous?”

Sans dragged a hand down his tired features and scratched his beard absently as he debated on how much to say. Eventually, he decided he might as well follow his younger brother’s lead and put all his cards on the table. The jig was up as far as their being there anyways, and looking at the skeleton now, he suspected things would go more easily if he was honest than if he tried to minimize things. She didn’t seem the sort to easily swallow a lie in any case.

“It’s… yeah. Yeah it is,” he admitted eventually. “The last and only time it got turned on it opened a rift in space-time and dragged half of a laboratory in on my head.”

Arial stared. “What.”

“It also pulled my brother in before collapsing altogether.” Arial glanced sidelong at Papyrus, and Sans clarified, “My other brother. I’m the eldest, Pap is the youngest of the three of us.”

The skeleton nodded thoughtfully and stared absently into the depths of her tea while she processed all of this. ‘This’ was a lot, so both brothers gave her the time she needed, sipping their drinks while they waited until she was ready.  “So, what do you want then?” Arial asked eventually.

Sans stared at her, then set aside his mug and in a level voice said, “I just need a place to work on the machine safely so I can get my brother back, that’s why we’re all the way out here in the back ass of nowhere in a run down house with no electricity. I just want to save our brother.”

Despite having only just met her, the man could tell she was thinking hard and weighing her options. The skeleton sat back in her seat and bit absently at the end of her thumb like a human would a fingernail, and for some reason the gesture made a smile tug at the corners of his mouth.

“Please let us stay,” Papyrus said, cradling his mostly untouched tea in his large, calloused hands as he looked at the skeleton with soulful eyes. “We could pay rent if you want-” Sans flinched in spite of himself, the movement drawing Arial’s gaze, but his brother pressed on, “Or maybe we could help you with something? What brings you out here now after so long?”

Arial grimaced a little at the question, and though she didn’t technically owe either man an answer, she admitted, “My grandfather left me this place when he died about two and a half years ago, actually. I know he’d been wanting to get back out here and fix this place up for ages, maybe get it in the historical registry, but my aunt and uncle contested the will.”

“Why would they do that?” Papyrus asked, affronted for her sake. “If your grandfather willed it to you, then it should have gone to you!”

Apparently less naive than his brother, a sour smile pulled at Sans’ mouth. “Because a pretty piece of property like this would be worth quite a lot of money, Pap.” He frowned a little as he leaned against the arm of his seat and propped his chin up on one hand, then asked, “If they were looking to make money on the place, though, they did a shit job keeping it up.”

“They wanted to tear it down and build some sort of resort or something,” Arial explained with a sigh. “Anyways, my claim won out in the end, but it took until literally last week, so here I am. I didn’t even know the address for this place until then.”

A low whistle escaped Sans and Papyrus leaned over and gave her hand a sympathetic pat. “What do  _ you  _ want to do with the property, then?” he asked gently. 

“Well, I had been planning on getting it fixed up the way grandpa always wanted,” the skeleton sighed and frowned as she played with the string of her teabag in a distracted fashion. “Unfortunately, paying all the legal fees from fighting my relatives over this place ate up a good chunk of the money he left me to do that, and from what little I could tell in the dark, I think it’s going to take a lot more work than I can afford...”

Papyrus’ expression immediately lit up and he glanced at his brother over Arial’s head. Knowing exactly what the other man was thinking, Sans flashed him a rueful smile, but nodded his permission.

“What if we helped you restore your home in exchange for our staying here?” Papyrus suggested eagerly, nearly sloshing his tea in his excitement. Arial blinked in surprise at the suggestion, and when she didn’t immediately give an answer, the tall man continued, “I am  _ excellent  _ at building all sorts of things, you know!” Papyrus’ smile went a little melancholy as he added, “We had to be, in the Underground.”

“Well...” Arial began, but was clearly still hesitant. Both men  _ seemed  _ nice enough, and having essentially free labor would definitely help her funds go further in restoring the manor, but…

“How about you give us a month test run, kid,” Sans suggested quietly and Papyrus nodded his eager agreement. “Any real big structural repairs are probably gonna take a pro, but Pap and I can handle a lot of other stuff. We pretty much built our place back in the Underground from the ground up.”

The skeleton looked at him thoughtfully, expression difficult for him to read, and not just because she was a monster. Eventually, she asked, “Can I see it again? This machine of yours?”

Sans blinked, wrong-footed by the request. Seeing no reason to object, though, he shrugged and said, “Yeah, if you want. Right now?”

“Please.”

The man got to his feet and Arial followed suit while Papyrus collected their mugs and took them to the sink to wash. He didn’t try to follow them as Sans lead her back the way they had come, pulling out his own phone to light the way down the spiral stairs into the basement.

“Good grief, what is  _ with  _ these stairs?” Arial asked about halfway down as she bent and collected her phone. As she had thought, the screen was badly cracked and it didn’t respond to anything she did.

“I have no idea,” Sans said with a huff of amusement as he paused a few stairs below her while the skeleton pocketed her phone. “Maybe the builder had something against straight lines,” he mused as they started on again. “Deathtrap, I call ‘em.”

Arial chuckled and nodded her agreement, then blinked against the sudden onslaught of fluorescent light as they rounded the last bend and found themselves in the basement once more. Sans entered first, then stepped to one side to allow her to move around the place as she pleased.

Looking at it closer now, without a fog of fear plaguing her, Arial was able to see just how big the room was. Even besides the mess she’d made throwing Sans during their altercation earlier, the place was far from tidy. There were a lot of mismatched tables that looked like they’d been pulled from all over the house. In fact, Arial was fairly certain that one particularly large one was actually a pool table with a piece of plywood on top to provide an even work surface.

Every one of them was covered in tools, hand written notes, or bits of machinery with unknown purpose. Most eye catching, and what she focused on now, though, was the machine itself.

On closer inspection, she realized that the semi-cobbled together look it had was likely thanks to the fact that Sans would have had to take it apart to move it all the way up from the Underground. And that was  _ before  _ he got it all the way down the spiral stairs to the basement itself. He must have had a good reason for wanting it down there to have gone through all the trouble, and Arial suspected it was to minimize any damage should the worst happen while he was working.

Sans watched her from his place by the door uncertain as to her intent in looking at the machine a second time. It wasn’t as though she’d be able to tell if he’d been lying to her about its purpose just by looking at it, after all. Not that he  _ had  _ been, but still. 

She stood with her back to him for a long minute until something in the air around her shifted subtly and the skeleton asked. “Tell me again.”

“Tell you what?” Sans asked, brow knit in confusion, the small hairs on the back of his neck standing on end suddenly as he had to force down the urge to take a step back towards the door.

She turned then, and looked at him over one narrow shoulder, her right eye socket gone completely dark. The left, however, blazed with cyan light, and when it focused on Sans he felt as though she were staring into his very soul.

“Tell me what you’re doing with this machine.”

Magic, he realized, she was using magic, though it was a kind he had never seen before. It made his skin crawl, though at the very least he found he  _ was  _ able to move, and neither did he feel compelled to answer her. After a moment’s consideration, however, he did. “I’m trying to fix and recalibrate it so I can open a stable portal and bring my brother back.”

Arial watched him for a moment longer as the silence hung between them, magic thick in the air. Then, all at once, it faded as quickly as it had arrived and her posture relaxed as her eyes returned to normal. “Alright,” she said, then offered him one pale hand to shake. “I’ll take you and your brother on for a month trial and see how this all works out. We can make it official with a written contract later after we’ve all gotten some sleep.”

Sans stared at her outstretched hand for a moment, then finally reached out to take it, knowing that this was his best choice to actually complete his mission while also keeping a (sometimes leaky) roof over he and his brother’s heads. What her magic had revealed to Arial to make her agree to his suggestion was beyond the man, but at that point he wasn’t about to question it for fear of her reconsidering. Not today, anyways.

At the last moment, however, Arial pulled her hand back, surprising him, and added, “If your machine blows my house up, though, you have to pay damages.”

A snort of amusement escaped Sans and he gave the skeleton a lopsided grin. “Yeah, alright, assuming I don’t go up with it,” he mused and she smiled and took his hand. Her grip was firm, but not uncomfortably so, which surprised the man a little, considering she was a skeleton. Then again, on brief inspection, her hands weren’t exactly the same as a human skeleton’s. The bones of her phalanges were much thicker, for one, and rather than having exposed metacarpals for palms, she had a series of interlocking plates that slid smoothly along one another with the flex of her hand.

“Three shakes is generally enough, I think,” Arial remarked, and with a start Sans realized he’d gone on shaking her hand far longer than was normal.

He dropped her hand quickly and said, “Sorry. Ignore me, I’m even more tired than normal.” Sans glanced around the room and sighed a little at the mess that had been made earlier during their scuffle. On a normal day he would have left it to clean up later, but he was fairly sure there was bottle of acid under there somewhere that he should really check wasn’t broken and disintegrating his books  _ or  _ the floor.

Arial seemed to catch his train of thought and immediately flushed as she remembered it had been largely her fault. “Here, let me help,” she said quickly, and before he could stop her, the monster had lifted hands that glowed with dark blue magic. In response, the top layer of debris from the pile lifted away and began to stack itself neatly along one wall.

Sans whistled in appreciation for the show of power. “Impressive, kid. Not sure what you were afraid of Pap for when you coulda’ just tossed him out the nearest window, though,” he mused.

The skeleton grimaced a little as she glanced at him sidelong. “I’m… well, I’m not very good at using magic if I can’t take a moment and focus on what I’m doing,” she admitted. “Plus, it  _ was  _ my first time being chased by what I thought was an axe murderer while all alone in an abandoned house in the mountains.”

“That’s fair,” Sans said and chuckled.

She grinned at him in turn, suddenly caught off guard by the realization of how pleasant the man’s laugh was. Distracted by the errant thought, Arial fumbled a box with her magic, making her look around sharply with a soft, “Shoot-” as it knocked into several lengths of pipe that had been leaned up against the wall. They toppled sideways towards the machine, and before she could catch them, crashed into the back of it.

There was a brief moment of silence as they both stood there, frozen in place by horror as first one second, and then two ticked by at a snail’s pace. Just as they started to take a breath of relief, however, all hell broke loose.

Darkness sparked over the glass encased platform like the formation of a pulsing, shifting crack in the very fabric of reality. The entire machine began to shake as the shadow grew, and before Sans could take more than a step towards the control panel to shut it down, the glass put in place to contain it cracked and shattered, exposing the room to what appeared to be a rapidly growing black hole.

The man swore and threw up his arms to protect himself from the glittering projectiles, but before they could reach either of them, they were sucked back into the inky darkness of the rift in space-time. Sans’ relief at this didn’t last long when he felt his slippered feet begin to slide across the floor towards his creation as it began to pull him in as well.

Before he got far, however, he felt a hand latch onto his wrist and drag him back with a strength far greater than his own. Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw Arial, eye sockets wide with panic but clinging desperately to both him and a heavy looking bit of exposed pipe anchored to the wall. 

The world itself seemed to howl around them, deafening and terrible as the rift grew in fits and bursts like a crack developing in the glass of a fish tank about to give way. Its pull grew so great that Sans felt his feet leave the floor and he twisted his hand in Arial’s grip so he latched onto her wrist in turn. Panic making his heart thunder deafeningly in his ears, he still felt a spark of admiration as the monster gritted her teeth and pulled him in towards her with one arm, then twisted so he wound up pressed between her narrow frame and the wall, freeing up both her hands to grip the pipes set into the wall.

“We have to turn it off!” he screamed at her, voice only barely audible over the noise of reality threatening to collapse in on itself. He wasn’t sure if she heard him or not, though, as her gaze flicked sideways towards the door where he saw Papyrus wedged up against the doorframe to the stairs, staring in baffled horror at the scene before him. Sans flailed an arm in his direction and managed to grab his attention as everything suddenly went  _ very  _ strange.

“Run!” he screamed at his brother, waving him away. “Dammit Pap, run!”

The color bled from the world around them as the rift grew wider yet, and it seemed to Papyrus that everything had gone just slightly out of focus. Or, rather, like someone had overlaid several mismatching slides directly over one another. The man knew precisely what his brother was saying to him, but he ignored it, knowing there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell he was about to leave him and their new landlady to the same fate as Gaster.

Papyrus looked around desperately for some solution, heart rate spiking as he realized the pipes to which Arial was clinging were beginning to bend away from the wall, threatening to give out at any moment.

One of the lights overhead burst with a flash and the sparks reflected off the blade of his axe where it still leaned against the wall by his right foot, prevented from being sucked into the room by the frame of the door. The man’s eyes went wide at the sight of it, and without a second thought, he picked it up in one hand and gripped it tight by the handle. For a moment he considered throwing it, he’d long since become a deft hand at that, but with the air so turbulent and wild, he doubted he could hit the main console.

Again his gaze went to his older brother, and Sans could tell the moment Papyrus came to a decision by the set of his jaw. He screamed and reached fruitlessly for him, but the taller man’s eyes were locked on the control console set into the front of the machine. 

Papyrus took a breath, then, in one fluid movement, sprang forward and threw himself towards the machine. Arial twisted to watch him go, eye sockets wide with horror as his tall, lean figure arced gracefully through the air while Sans screamed himself hoarse. Shadows dancing madly around him, Papyrus swung his axe up and over his head, then brought it down in a perfect glittering crescent strike that slammed the blade home into the control console with a boom like thunder.

For a moment, it seemed as though nothing would happen, and then everything twisted sickeningly, compelling all three of them to shut their eyes against the unnatural contortions the world around them suddenly experienced. After a moment that felt like an eternity, there was a peculiar ‘pop’ and the horrible roaring of the machine was gone, as was the inescapable drag of the rift itself.

“Oh thank god,” Arial wheezed quietly as she opened her eyes to look at the world once more. Her view of the wall, at least, wasn’t much changed, with the exception of the indents her hands had left on the pipes to which she had clung.

“Wow! That was intense!” Papyrus said with a high, shaky laugh as he released his grip on his axe and planted his feet solidly on the ground once more.

“Stupid is what it was, you lunatic!” Sans barked, full of more energy than Arial had seen from him all night as he disentangled himself from her and began to storm towards his brother, a furious expression on his dark features. “You could have- ” he began, then stopped as a change in the room suddenly registered with him. There were no longer three people in the basement, there were  _ six. _

Well, five people and one eight foot tall robot with a tv for a head.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again for reading! Next chapter will be up in a week and you'll get to find out just who it is that landed in the basement with Arial and the boys XD  
> Make sure to leave me a comment letting me know what your favorite part of the chapter was, I love hearing that from you guys!


	3. You're nicked

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to chapter three, and thanks so much to everyone that left a comment on chapter two; you're awesome! If you didn't, well... sorry but you are not awesome. You are a mooch. Redeem yourself by leaving a comment on this chapter and tell me what your favorite part was! I actually really love hearing that from my readers!
> 
> Don't forget to follow me over at [jolie-in-the-underground](http://jolie-in-the-underground.tumblr.com/) on tumblr for updates and also art! I've already [done headshots](https://jolie-in-the-underground.tumblr.com/post/174659041390/make-yourself-at-home-just-no-shoes-on-the) of all the guys plus Arial if you want to see what they look like!

There was a long moment of silence that hung in the air before Sans finally cut the tension with a soft but vehement, “ _ Shit. _ ”

“Sans!” Papyrus chided him as he too looked around at their new guests, who appeared no less confused than they did. Well, the humans did, anyways. The robot’s(?) blank screen flickered strangely but otherwise it remained completely still.

Before anyone could say more, though, there was a loud bang from upstairs that made everyone but the robot jump and finally spurred one of the strangers to speak.

“The hell is going on?” the taller of the two new humans asked, brow furrowed, voice gruff.

He was fairly tall for a human, though not so tall as Papyrus, and wearing a baggy orange hoodie with a worn looking pair of jeans and black converse. He wore his black hair tugged back in a short ponytail, and he narrowed his dark, almond shaped eyes as his gaze flicked across the three of them, and then around the room.

Beside him, the stranger's companion blinked and looked around as well, wide-eyed and curious. He was the shortest person in the room besides Arial, though he didn't have much height on her either. His hair was equally dark as his companion's, though significantly shorter. It didn't take more than a glance to tell an observer that the two were brothers, despite the difference in their builds. The shorter, and clearly younger, of the two of them was much broader across the chest and more obviously muscular under his brown leather jacket and pale blue shirt.

The man gave a start when he saw the robot that lurked behind him, eyes going wider yet in shock, and then delight. “Oh my god! Is that a robot?!” he exclaimed and bounded immediately towards it. “Papy look!”

The taller man’s head jerked around at his brother’s antics and his brows immediately snapped down with concern, “Sans, hold up, we don’t know what that actually is.”

Papyrus, Sans, and Arial all gave a start at the stranger’s names, but the short man continued on, unabashed by the peculiar circumstances he’d found himself in. “But look how awesome it is!” He proclaimed and looked around at the three strangers in the room. “Is it yours? Did you build it?”

“Uh,” Sans said, clearly at a loss. “Nope, showed up when you guys did; figured it was yours,” he continued and scratched absently at the back of his neck. He and everyone else jumped and glanced towards the ceilings when another bang echoed from upstairs.

“I’m going to go see what that is,” Papyrus said, brow furrowed thoughtfully. “Maybe that tricky raccoon got in again!”

“The hell kind of raccoons you got around this place,” ‘Papy’ asked skeptically.

Before Papyrus could take more than a step, though, Sans waved a hand for him to stop. “I’ll go, you uh… figure out what’s up with these guys,” he said.

Arial could tell from the way he glanced at the strangers (and as yet unmoving robot) that he didn’t particularly like the idea of leaving his brother alone with them, but the thumping upstairs was becoming louder and more erratic with each moment that passed, and the thought of sending Papyrus up into the complete unknown was clearly the less desirable of two options. Before he got more than a few steps towards the stairs, however, the robot suddenly lurched in place, a horrible grinding sound erupting from it.

The other Sans jerked his hand back from where he had just touched the robot’s chest piece and flashed them a guilty look. “All I did was touch it!” he insisted and took a quick step back as the machine took an unsteady one forward, the television that served as its head jerking sharply to the side as a bright blue error screen illuminated it.

“Prox-proximity alert,” it proclaimed, electronic voice uneven and grating as it took another step, long arms twitching. “Initiaaaaaaaaaa-” There was another horrible sound that cut off as abruptly as it started as it continued, “-ti-ti-tingggg self defense measssssur-ur-ures.”

The machine took another step, its every motion sharp and over extended, as though commands to its limbs were only getting through in fits and bursts. The younger Sans looked uncertainly back at his brother and the others before a sudden movement drew his gaze back to the problem at hand, which had suddenly escalated exponentially.

“Oh hell,” he said, going pale as the robot lifted a hand the size of the man’s head, only for it transform into what appeared to be some sort of canon. Light bloomed within the depths of the barrel as he watched, frozen in horror, until his brother full body tackled him out of the way in an orange blur Arial could barely track.

The blast blew a hole in the cement floor, sending shrapnel and all five of them flying backwards through the air.

Sans crashed into the doorframe before dropping into a heap at the base of the stairs while his brother wound up half draped over the broken machine console again. The two strangers lay in a tangled pile of limbs near Arial who was the first to her feet.

She watched as the robot looked around unsteadily, head twitching as it tried to assess the situation before lifting its cannon arm again and taking aim at Papyrus, who caught its attention first.

“Wait!” the skeleton exclaimed desperately and threw herself between the two, arms spread wide to make herself as big a target as possible. The canon immediately adjusted to aim at her, the end of its barrel a few scant inches from her chest. “It’s alright,” she said in the most soothing tone she could manage, “We’re not going to hurt you, I promise. We’re just as confused as you are, but we’ll figure this out, okay?”

To her surprise, the thing actually hesitated, and the ominous glow within the depths of the barrel dimmed some. 

“Good,” she said, a smile of relief overtaking her pale features. “Now just put that away and we can-”

There was the soft, but distinct scrape of steel behind her, and the robot’s head jerked up as she turned in time to see Sans and the man in the orange hoodie rushing towards them, each bearing a length of pipe in their hands. Before Arial could get a word out, the robot had lifted its weapon again, aimed past her this time, but it was too late. The man in orange went high, his pipe colliding with the robot’s head with a deafening crash and the sound of breaking glass while Sans went low, sweeping one leg out from under it and sending the machine toppling to the floor in a crumpled heap.

“Papy!” The man in blue cried, shocked by the sudden onslaught even as his brother and Sans closed in on the twitching heap of electronics, set on finishing the job before it could get back up and attack again.

Arial watched in stunned horror as Sans and ‘Papy’ stood over the robot for a moment, then shared a look that spoke volumes. They both raised their pipes, but the skeleton was already moving, throwing herself on top of the robot to shield it from their attack.

“Stop!” she yelled fiercely and both men hesitated at the last second, only barely saving her from being hit herself. “Can’t you see it’s just confused?” the monster demanded, glowering at both of them over her shoulder when she was sure she wasn’t about to get hit. Beneath her, the robot shifted, trying to lift its head, and Arial turned to look at it, her face very close to its badly cracked screen. “Shh, it’s alright, just lay still, you’ll be okay. They won’t hurt you,” she promised, then glared back over her shoulder at the humans again.

“Kid, come on,” Sans said, conscience stinging in an unexpected way under her furious gaze. Behind him, Papyrus had managed to disentangle himself from the machine’s console and approached to place a hand on his brother’s shoulder.

“Don’t break it, Sans,” he said, voice gentle and pleading.

“What?  _ I’m  _ not gonna-” the man in blue began, confused.

Sans looked to the shorter man, one brow quirked as he said, “He’s talking to me.”

“Your name’s Sans too?” the man in blue asked, taken aback, then turned to Papyrus and asked, “What about you?”

“I’m Papyrus!” 

“Uh-” said ‘Papy’ as he stared up at the taller man.

Sans gave a tired sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Lemme guess,” he drawled and pointed at the man in orange, “Your name’s Papyrus too?”

The stranger nodded and looked around their peculiar group. “So uh, not to beat a dead horse or anything but…  _ what the hell is going on? _ ”

Only half listening to the conversation between the humans behind her, Arial carefully lifted herself from the robot and crouched over it with a frown of concern on her face.

“R-r-re-caaaaaalibrati-ti-ting,” it said, audio weaker and more uneven than ever. “System res-es-estore-” there was a brief, terrible noise, and then the robot’s screen gave a final flicker before it lost power and went ragdoll. Its head hit concrete with a dull thunk that sent a lance of sorrow through Arial’s soul.

“You killed it,” she said, finally attracting the attention of the humans as she sat back on her heels and fought back tears, feeling unaccountably sad.

“It’s a machine-” the man in the orange hoodie said with a frown, recalling too clearly what it had nearly done to his brother.

“You don’t know  _ what _ it was!” Arial shot back sharply as she got to her feet and stepped over the robot’s limp legs and jabbed him sharply in the chest with a finger. “It was just lost and confused, or-or malfunctioning and you  _ killed  _ it!”

The skeleton glared at him, and then at Sans. Papyrus and the shorter Sans were spared her wrath, though both older brothers looked taken aback, then averted their eyes as they found themselves unable to hold her gaze. 

“Look, maybe we can fix it?” the other Sans suggested helpfully. “I bet-”

He was cut off by the sound of gunfire directly over head, making them all flinch and duck reflexively. Another shot, followed by the boom of a shotgun and the crash of breaking glass echoed through the house. They all waited for a wide-eyed, breathless moment until the noise faded and became more distant.

“I don’t think it’s a raccoon,” Sans said slowly.

The man in the orange hoodie snorted and Arial shot Sans a flat look his attempt humor. He shrugged a shoulder, smile wry and helpless.

Finally, the skeleton straightened and said, “I’m going up there. I can’t just let someone shoot up my house and god knows who else!” She headed towards the stairs and muttered, “We’ve already had  _ one  _ person die thanks to all this, I’m not waiting around for another!”

“I'll go with you,” Papyrus immediately volunteered and quickly closed the distance between himself and the skeleton before casting a significant look back over his shoulder at his brother.

Sans heaved a sigh but followed suite despite his every nerve screaming that he was going in precisely the wrong direction.

Behind them, the new humans debated between themselves while the others got further and further up the stairs.

“We should go with them!” Sans insisted impatiently, waving a hand in the direction of the door. “They might need help!”

“We're not gonna go charging into a  _ gunfight  _ or whatever is going on up there!” His brother hissed incredulously. “Whatever's going on here seems to be their fault, so we're just going to stay down here until it clears up, then get our answers when the dust settles.”

Sans rolled his eyes expressively. “Papy, we're not going to  _ get  _ answers if they're dead!”

Papyrus stared at his younger brother, unable to deny the truth of the statement, but still unwilling to admit it.

The other man huffed and said, “Well, fine. You can stay here, but  _ I'm  _ going to go help,” then spun on heel and hurried after the others, taking the stairs two at a time when he reached them.

The taller human pinched the bridge of his nose as he took a long, deep breath, then softly muttered, “Shit,” and went after his brother.

He caught up just in time to overhear Sans talking to the skeleton monster ahead of him. “So, is your name Sans too?” he asked in that slightly too-high joking tone he got when he was nervous.

She glanced back over her shoulder at him as they climbed the stairs and said, “No, my name's Arial.” Her brow furrowed a little and she asked, “But you two... you said your names were Sans and Papyrus too?” then glanced ahead of her at the other Sans.

He did bear a peculiar resemblance to his younger brother, Papyrus had to admit; if the two somehow swapped age  _ and  _ demeanor. It wasn’t exact; the older man’s hair was curlier for one, eyes deeper set and less angled, and his skin darker. 

“That machine back there,” Papyrus said when the stranger didn't comment, “you used it to open some sort of interdimensional rift, didn't you?”

_ That  _ got a response.

The other man twitched and looked back at him, dark eyes wide. After a moment, his expression turned rueful, however, and he asked, “Looks familiar, does it?” Papyrus didn’t respond and Sans snorted lightly and turned his attention back to the task at hand. “We’ll talk later when we find out who  _ else  _ got dragged here.”

“This is seriously another universe?” the younger Sans asked, wide eyed as he looked between his doppelganger and his brother, who shrugged.

“Looks like, bro,” he mused, smiling for his sake even as uncertainty churned in his gut.

He might have said more, but Papyrus and Arial had reached the door at the top of the stairs and the former motioned to them all for quiet. Despite making it to the ground floor, the gunfire remained fairly faint, though closer at hand than it had been.

“Careful, Pap,” Sans warned as his little brother carefully pushed open the door, waited a moment, and then peered around the edge. When nothing happened he stepped out a little further and said, “The coast is clear in here at least,” in a whispered tone.

Quietly as they could manage, all five of them filed out into the hallway then paused, listening.

“Sounds like it's coming from the back of the house,”Arial whispered and flinched as another volley of gunfire echoed down the hall. When it died down again, the men started forward, but she called, “Sans, wait-” only to have two pairs of eyes turned back in her direction. “Er,” she said with an apologetic grimace to the younger of the two. “I meant the other one, sorry.”

“This is awfully confusing, having two of everyone but Arial,” the taller of the two Papyruses said with a slight frown. His expression lit up again almost immediately, though as he suggested, “What if we give you two code names, just so we don't get confused!”

“Why us and not you?” his older doppelganger asked with the arch of a brow.

“It's our universe, that's why, now just hurry up and pick something,” Sans said impatiently.

Papyrus looked ready to object, but his brother patted his arm and gave him a smile, “Come on, Papy, it'll be fun!” He looked around and then down at his shirt, expression lighting up, “Call me Blue!” he said with a tug at the length of fabric and a bright smile.

His brother rolled his eyes, but after a moment, finally said, “Call me Stretch, then.”

Blue looked at his brother and muffled a grin behind a hand which earned him a wink and an upward quirk of his lips.

Under normal circumstances, Arial might have asked questions, but considering the situation, she tabled them for later and turned to the group at large. “I say we go out the front and circle around the side of the house to the back. If we just go bursting straight out the back...”

Her words petered out, but they could all connect the dots and quickly nodded their agreement to her plan.

Without prompting, Papyrus took the lead again, though Sans took Arial's place directly on his heels so the skeleton wound up in the middle of the group. The halls through which they carefully moved were mostly untouched from what she could tell... until they made it into the main entry hall.

A small sound of outrage escaped her when they stepped into what looked like a war zone. There hadn't been much in the way of furniture in the room, but the walls were now riddled with holes, buckshot and single rounds alike. Only the fact that there were apparently  _ at least  _ two maniacs with guns running around made her refrain from speaking up and kept the skeleton moving. Blue gave her shoulder a pat of condolence as he came up beside her, and she offered him a half-smile in turn.

It was beginning to rain as they worked their way around the perimeter of the house, taking their time and listening as they went lest they wind up coming face to face with someone they'd rather observe from afar first. When they reached the back, they squeezed together at the corner of the building to peer through the murky dark.

The old manor sat atop a hill that was a gradual climb in the front where the main drive was, but past the stretch of yard out back, turned into something just shy of a cliff. It was at the edge of this they saw four people having a standoff, and despite not being able to make out any details, it was obvious by their statures that they were yet more versions of Sans and Papyrus. They were paired off, one tall, one short as they stared each other down like stars of an old western movie.

There was a soft click, and then one of the men swore. “I'm out,” he growled in a rough voice that carried easily across the open lawn. His taller partner made an annoyed sound and cocked the hammer on the pistol he still had trained on their opponents, but the first didn't waste time as his shotgun was relegated to his back, and some sort of club was drawn from where it hung on his belt.

“Hah!” crowed the shorter of two brothers across from them, sounding smug. “A classic strategical error, you fell for my clever plot! Now you have no ammunition and  _ we  _ do!” he declared.

“Pardon me, Captain, but I'm out as well,” his brother said. The taller man stood behind him, and Arial realized why as she recognized that the shorter of the two brothers was carrying was a shield of some sort.

“What?!” the first demanded furiously. “Then take my pistol from my belt and-”

“You're out too, Captain.”

The man carrying the shield swore vehemently while the man already wielding a pistol (another Papyrus, Arial guessed by his height) laughed. “Who's the fool now, fool!” he proclaimed, then pulled the trigger.

There was a click, and then the soft fizzle of a misfire, followed by another click as the hammer hit an empty chamber.

“Old fashioned way it is then,” growled the shorter man beside him, then charged forward, closing the distance between himself and their opponents while his brother holstered his pistol and followed suit. 

The tall man produced a frighteningly long machete from the sheath on his back while his doppelganger produced twin daggers from under his long military cut coat. Their brothers’ met first, though, the taller and broader of them bringing his club up and around to meet the other’s shield with a crash like thunder. He was forced to jerk it sharply to the side again when the shield bearer produced a short sword whose blade sank into the wood of the club with a dull thunk.

“We have to do something,” Papyrus hissed quietly to the rest of the group, an expression of concern on his features. “Someone’s going to get hurt!”

“I think that’s kinda their goal, bro,” Sans replied, eyes narrowed against the rain as his gaze darted here and there, clearly thinking fast.

Blue pressed in closer to Arial as he pushed at the wet locks of hair that had become plastered to his brow and said, “I think that one guy is using a baseball bat full of  _ nails _ as a club,” horror clear in his voice.

She nodded, but before she could reply, Stretch said, “We  _ could  _ just let them have at it. They don’t seem likely to stop if we ask nice.”

Sans grimaced and said, “Much as I’d like to agree, last thing I need is a few unexplained corpses on the property.”

“That’s the last thing  _ we  _ need,“ Arial clarified and chewed absently on her bottom lip.

While they mulled over their very limited options, the combatants battled on, seeming evenly matched in skill, though the man with the bat had managed to wrench his doppelganger’s sword out of his grip, leaving him with only his shield.

“I’m going for the flood lights,” Sans said finally with a determined frown on his face as he glanced around at the others. “Should still be hooked up to the generator and might startle them at least; maybe that’ll give us the chance we need.”

“The chance to  _ what? _ ” Stretch asked, both brows raised incredulously.

“Dunno,” Sans said, flashing him a lopsided grin, “Better think of something fast, though.”

He darted off into the darkness and before anyone could lay a hand on him, he was gone, footsteps lost almost immediately in the patter of the rain.

“Oh dear,” Papyrus murmured, spurring Arial to reach out and lay a reassuring hand on his shoulder. He looked around at her, brows furrowed with worry before saying, “Maybe we should run out and try to disarm them while they’re still recovering once the lights come on.”

“That seems like a  _ terrible  _ idea,” Stretch said, not unreasonably in Arial’s mind, though she wasn’t sure what else they could possibly do.

“I’m in,” Blue said at the same time.

Before his brother could object, however, from somewhere in the dark, Sans shouted, “Hey, assholes!”

His voice carried easily across the lawn, and while the two shorter brothers (who were rolling around in the mud at the edge of the cliff now) didn’t look around, the taller ones did, and were immediately blinded when a bright light flooded the lawn. Both of them threw up their hands to shield their eyes and Papyrus wasted no time sprinting forward before anyone could stop him, and Arial followed suit.

He caught the man with the machete completely off guard, wrenching the weapon from his grasp and hurling it away into the dark before he even realized what was happening. Arial made a bee-line for the man with the daggers, though she had no idea what she would do when she got there beyond attempt to tackle him to the ground. 

Luckily, she didn’t have to find out as Blue beat her to the punch; literally. When Arial was barely two yards out, just as the man was turning to look at her, Blue darted in between them, low and fast to unleash a flurry of punches she could barely follow, but ended in an uppercut that caught the stranger right in the base of the jaw. He swore violently and stumbled back, clearly dazed, as Arial skidded to a halt.

Papyrus hadn’t gotten his doppelganger to the ground, but he did have his arm twisted up behind his back, making it difficult for the other man to pull free as Arial shouted, “Everyone calm down and quit trying to kill each other! We don’t want to hurt you!”

In the bright light that now emanated from the back of the house, the skeleton was able to see, in vivid detail, the moment the fight between the two Sanses rolling around on the ground tipped in one’s favor. The blond, clad in a mud spattered military coat matching the one the dagger wielding Papyrus wore, had been pinned beneath the much greater bulk of his red headed doppelganger until the latter became distracted by Arial herself.

The second of hesitation allowed the blond to wrest his arm free of the other’s grip and swing his shield up to clip him hard across the temple. His doppelganger wavered for a second, then toppled sideways off the back of the hill, taking the other with him as his lingering grip proved too strong to pull free of.

“S-sargeant!” the smaller man gasped in the moment before he disappeared into the dark below with a shout.

“Captain!” the dagger wielding man shouted, horrified as he whipped around from his face-off with Blue just in time to see his brother go. He ran directly for the edge, and seemed set on jumping after him, but was brought up short by Arial and Blue, both of whom managed to grab him by the coat tails and drag him back.

“Let me go!” he snarled and lashed out viciously, only just missing striking Blue across the jaw with the hilt of his dagger.

The man tried to roll over and get his feet under him with the intent of attacking his saviors only to find himself pinned in place by Stretch who grabbed one of his wrists and twisted it painfully until he dropped one knife, which Sans kicked away as he sprinted up to help. Blue did the same to the other while the man roared his fury, back arching in an attempt to free himself.

“Just calm down!” Arial shouted, “We’ll help you find him, just stop fighting! I know a safe way down so you won’t break your stupid neck going after him!”

The man's chest was heaving from the exertion of his fight while he continued to struggle, though at Arial's words, his eyes darted around the group, nostrils flared wide and expression distrustful.

“Who are you people?” he demanded. “Where are we? This isn't the front.”

“You're in an alternate universe from your own, you were brought here by freak accident,” Sans grunted and Arial looked around to see him helping Papyrus pin his opponent to the ground. The stranger had a wild, ragged look to him, face splattered with mud; expression one of pure hate.

“I'll kill you!” he roared, trying to throw the brothers off of him but failing. “I'll kill all of you then I'll hunt down that little blonde shit and take his head!”

The man beneath Arial, Blue, and Stretch had just started to calm when he overhead the threat and twisted out of their slackening grips to vault over Arial. He closed the distance between himself and his opponent, then before anyone could stop him, kicked the other man viciously in the gut.

There was a general outcry from the rest of the group as Papyrus jumped up and pushed the other man away before he could try it again. “That's enough!” he said.

“Please, we won't let him hurt your brother, Papyrus,” Arial insisted to the dagger wielding man, taking a calculated risk in guessing his name. Every other tall, lean man she'd met so far that evening had shared it, after all.

She must have guessed right, as he snapped around to look at her again when she spoke. What she hadn't expected, however, was the look of sheer animosity that took over his pale features the moment he finally registered that she was a monster. Having never been on the receiving end of such a look of pure hatred before, Arial froze, wide-eyed as he lunged at her.

Before he got more than a step, though, he went face down in the mud as Sans kicked his legs out from under him, leaving the other Papyrus to his brother's care. He jumped on her would be attacker's back before he could push himself up again, and dragged his arms up behind him in a tight hold the man could not escape.

“What are you doing?!” he demanded, wild-eyed gaze darting from face to face. “Kill that thing before it takes all our souls!”

Arial flinched at the accusation, horrified by the very thought. “What? I'd never,” she exclaimed, feeling ill.

“Look, buddy,” Sans grunted, taking a better hold of the man under him, “I don't know what things are like where you're from, but that's not how things are done here.”

“Yeah, you're really selling me with the fucking chokehold,” the other man snarled roughly.

“Well, maybe if you stopped trying to stab people for thirty seconds,” Stretch drawled. He stepped closer then dropped into a crouch in front of the man to get a better look at him.

Just like with Sans and Blue, this man pinned to the ground, mud splattered across his face, bore a peculiar similarity to Stretch himself. He took a moment to let his eyes trace over the other's features, and wondered just  _ what  _ gave that impression. Taken by themselves, after all, there really weren't many similarities at all. The stranger’s eyes were rounder in shape and gray in color; his skin fairer, hair longer and paired with a goatee. Both of their faces' were angular and on the long side, but not quite in the same way.

Put all the pieces together, however, and somehow you got a man that, if he didn't  _ look  _ like Stretch, at the very least gave the  _ impression  _ of being like him. Like there was some deeper Papyrus-y essence they both possessed that shone through and marked them for who they were, no matter what universe they hailed from.

“If you can promise not to  _ stab  _ anyone, we'll help you guys find your brothers then come back and figure all this madness out, right?” Stretch asked. The man still looked distrustful, so he continued, “Look, we're in the same boat as you, we're not from here,” and jerked his thumb back over his shoulder at where Blue stood protectively in front of Arial. He could see the moment the other Papyrus registered the similarities in their siblings and a wry smile tugged at his mouth. “Starting to seem a little less mad, isn't it?”

Finally, the man nodded and said, “Alright, fine, let me up.”

Sans flashed Stretch a look as the other man pushed back to his feet and shrugged. It was as good as they were going to get.

“No attacking monsters, either,” Sans warned before finally releasing his captive and allowing him to stand before turning to look at his own brother and the third new Papyrus he'd met that evening. “How about you? Willing to hold off on the stabbing until we can figure some shit out?”

This Papyrus was even taller than his own brother, Sans noticed with some mild surprise as he looked him over, though not by much. There were more similarities between the two of them than the others which made him wonder if perhaps they weren't closer in age. They certainly didn't seem more similar in disposition, that was for sure.

“Well, seeing as someone decided to throw my machete  _ off a cliff,  _ ” the stranger began blandly as he tugged his leather jacket straight over his shoulders, a sour expression on his face. Papyrus no longer had his arm twisted up behind his back, though his brother  _ was  _ keeping a close eye on his doppelganger on the off chance he decided to try anything. “I suppose I don't really have a choice.”

“Good,” Sans said with a tight smile, “Glad we all understand each other then.” The much taller man shot him an ugly look, but he ignored it and turned to Arial instead. “That way down to the bottom, you meant that path that hooks down from the drive into the woods, right?”

The skeleton nodded. “If I remember the map I got of the property right, there's a stream down there so if we can find that, we can follow it until we find them.”

Sans nodded and started off at a brisk pace before any of their peculiar guests decided to come up with more objections, or produced yet more weapons.

“Your name's Papyrus, right?” Blue asked the newcomers as they walked, expression bright and open despite the very strange situation he found himself and his brother in. It seemed to Arial that he must be the sort to take just about anything in stride, though she did wonder if it wouldn't catch up to him later. She glanced sidelong at Stretch, but the man seemed more concerned with keeping a wary eye on his two violent doppelgangers more than his brother. “That's my brother's name too,” Blue continued when neither man answered right away. “We've decided to go by nicknames, though, so we don't get confused! What do you want yours to be?”

“Don't suppose just Papyrus is still available, huh?” the dagger wielding man asked dryly, one brow quirked.

“Nope,” Blue answered. “We decided he gets to keep it since this is his home universe,” he explained and pointed at Papyrus who strode along just behind Sans. The man waved over his shoulder and smiled as he caught the conversation, then turned back to say something to his brother. “My name's Sans, but I'm going by Blue, and my brother is Stretch.”

“I am the great and terrible Papyrus, I will not be using a  _ nickname, _ ” insisted the tallest member of their party, his mouth twisting into a moue of disgust.

“Cool it, edge-lord,” Stretch huffed with a roll of his eyes at the other man's annoyance.

“ _ Edge-lord?!”  _ The younger Papyrus demanded as he twisted to glare back at his doppelganger.

“Ooh! Edge, I like it!” Blue said cheerfully and Arial was forced to muffle a smile if only to save herself from the glower 'Edge' had leveled at the group, Blue in particular. The much shorter man seemed completely unaffected though, and turned expectantly towards the last unnamed member of the group.

“Just call me Rus,” he suggested before anyone else could come up with any clever ideas. They had entered the forest now, and he might have said more if they all hadn't become much more preoccupied with watching where they were going.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Side-note: the chapter title was a bit of a play on words since not only are they establishing nicknames in this chapter, but they also 'nicked' (caught) the gun wielding maniacs XD Bit of a shout-out to Samuel Vimes from the Discworld novels, heh.  
> Thanks again for reading, and make sure to drop a comment to let me know what your favorite part was, I love hearing it! Chapter four in a week :)


	4. 24 hour Tech Support

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much to those of you that left a comment last time, I really appreciate it! If you didn't... well, thanks for nothing, ya mooch.  
> Hope you guys enjoy, this is the second to last chapter for the initial installment of this story. It's plenty long, so make sure to leave a comment and let me know what your favorite part was! I really love hearing that from you guys!

It had already been a dark night thanks to the heavy cloud cover, but the shadows were even deeper beneath the trees. Sans and Papyrus both brought out their cellphones to light the way, though when Stretch and Blue tried to do the same, they both discovered that their phones were completely dead, or perhaps fried by their trip between realities. Arial's own phone was still back at the manor, and broken besides after its tumble down the basement stairs, so she tried to stick close to the group, though she was starting to fall behind.

A few steps ahead of her, Rus stumbled over some uneven footing and she reached out to stabilize him reflexively, her hand catching his upper arm to keep the man from toppling. She almost regretted the action when he turned to look at her though. The way his expression snapped down into a snarl of disgust was like a punch in the sternum. Rus snatched his arm out of Arial's grip so hard that she stumbled and fell to her knees while he quietly hissed, “Don't  _ fucking _ touch me,” and kept walking, seeming quite happy to leave her sitting in the mud.

Once again, Rus' animosity towards her took Arial completely off guard, so much so that it was all she could do to sit there and watch the group disappear among the trees. She'd never experienced such a level of hatred directed at her in her life. It stung to say the least, but after the initial wave of hurt she wondered what Rus' world was like that he'd hate her just for being... well, a monster.

Sure there was still plenty of tension between the species there in her own world, but she'd never seen anything so intense. Not that she'd had a ton of experience with humans, but still...

The rain, which had begun to peter off once they entered the forest, picked up again and snapped Arial out of her distraction. Realizing she was sitting on the forest floor, pants rapidly becoming soaked by the wet earth and fallen leaves while the group of men got further and further away, Arial started to push herself to her feet, but paused when she heard a rustling in the underbrush off to her left.

As the skeleton looked around for the source, a man stepped into view, and at first glance she thought Sans had doubled back to find her. Despite the shadows cast by the fall of his hood, though, Arial quickly realized that this was not the case. This man's skin was much darker, and while he was a similar height to Sans, he was significantly thinner.

Painfully thin, even.

“Hey, darlin', you lost?” the stranger asked, voice a low croon as he regarded her with soft, hazel eyes, head tilted to one side. A second, much taller man stepped into view just behind him, and Arial was sure she'd just found yet another Sans and Papyrus.

“No...” she answered hesitantly as she pushed herself to her feet once more. Despite the human's pleasant tone and smile, there was something about him that was setting her soul on edge. For the first time in her life she felt like a lamb staring down the snout of a wolf. “Are you?”

Arial's gaze flickered briefly to the taller man, but before she was able to do more than register his long dark hair caught up in hundreds of tiny braids, and the peculiar dust mask with a toothsome smile painted across it he wore, the strange Sans was moving. As the skeleton's back slammed into the bark of the tree behind her, Arial knew that breaking eye contact with him had been a mistake. Her eyelights flickered in pain, and she would have cried out if not for the fact that her attacker's forearm was planted firmly across her neck, forcing her chin up and back.

Panicked now, she struggled, but despite the fact that her strength should have far outclassed the human’s, she couldn't seem to get a good enough grip to force him off. He pressed her flush against the tree with a frame that felt almost as thin and angular as her own to keep her from getting any leverage, though this still left one of her arms free. Before she could do anything useful with it, however, a second pair of hands appeared and pinned it over her head to the back of the tree, making Arial’s eyes go wide as she realized the strange Papyrus had stepped in to help. There was something strapped to his back, she noted distantly as she fought and failed to escape, desperation driving her to call on her magic.

The skeleton took a breath, then felt for Sans’ soul and found it humming strong and bright in the center of his chest. Arial shoved out against it with her magic in a move that  _ should  _ have sent him flying away from her…

But it refused.

It was as though her magic slid right off of it, like a wave crashing against the rocks of the seashore. Eye sockets wide with confusion, her pinprick eyelights met his gaze once more and when he caught her looking, a thin smile crossed his dark features. “Sorry, darlin’ those tricks aren’t gonna work on me.”

With his brother there to help pin her, Sans shifted and reached beneath his coat, causing his hood to slip back off his head, revealing an undercut hairstyle with short dreads and three long, terrible scars across his scalp. Any concern Arial might have felt for her attacker at the sight died immediately when she saw the eight inch hunting knife in his hand.

She tried to scream, but couldn’t as he said, “We’ll make it fast, promise. You may be all bones, but you’ll keep me and Pap going for at least a few weeks; so, thanks for that,” then lifted the blade, gaze intense as he readied himself to strike.

When he did, the human was forced to shift his weight, and though it wasn’t much, it was enough to give Arial some little mobility in her left leg. Without hesitation, she jerked it sharply up into Sans’ crotch and knew she’d struck home when he doubled over with a pained grunt, knocking his brother back in the process.

Free, Arial immediately twisted away from the tree and ran blindly into the forest, paying no mind to which direction she was headed out of sheer panic until she caught a brief glimpse of light in the distance. The skeleton adjusted course towards it and pushed herself in a way she hadn’t needed to since she was still in school. Every monster child had to learn the extent of their magic and how to wield it safely to keep from accidentally harming others. Arial had never been a fighter, but she was still strong, and she put that strength into turning her dead sprint into a series of long, ground eating bounds that carried her rapidly through the forest.

Somehow, though, it wasn’t enough.

Arial could hear whistling as she ran, and she nearly tripped more than once as she looked back over her shoulder just in time to see one of the men through the trees before they disappeared into the darkness once more. The sound wasn’t melodious… it was a series of sharp, carrying notes that clearly communicated some kind of intent she had no hope of understanding.

Horrified but unsure of what else she could do besides keep moving, Arial realized she was being herded.

The skeleton broke from the treeline and found herself at the base of the drive not far from where she and the others had first entered the woods. The light she had seen through the trees hadn’t been someone’s phone, but the floodlights at the back of the manor that still shone bright as a beacon, leaving the decrepit building haloed in light.

Arial pushed herself harder, soul pounding high and panicked behind her ribs as she ran, nearly slipping on the rain soaked, overgrown lawn. There was a thin, piercing shriek of something cutting through the air at high speed, and then a lance of agony that cut bright and sharp along one of the skeleton’s ribs.

Shocked by the sudden pain, she stumbled and went down with a scream, barely catching herself with her hands before looking down at her side, eye sockets wide as faintly glowing tears sprang into being. There was a hole in her shirt, she realized, and beneath her, lodged several inches deep in the wet earth, was an arrow as long as her arm.

Trembling, Arial twisted and looked back the way she had come to see the strange Papyrus standing still at the edge of the forest some two-hundred and fifty yards behind her with a bow longer than she was tall in his hand. Much closer and more pressing, however, was Sans, who was bearing down on her much closer to hand at a dead sprint, a fireman’s axe in one hand, hunting knife nowhere to be seen.

Fear gave her feet wings, and Arial didn’t jump up so much as leap. The forward momentum carried her yards, rather than feet, and another such quickly followed, landing her at the front door at long last. As she shoved it open and darted inside, a second arrow slammed into the heavy, ancient wood, scant inches from her skull and she yelped, then slammed the door behind her.

* * *

The night was cold, wet, and downright peculiar, but Papyrus was still more excited than perturbed by the sudden appearance of so many different versions of himself and his brother. That said, he  _ was  _ somewhat concerned by how violent some of them were proving to be. Surely everything would calm down once they were all able to take a moment a figure out just what was going on, though.

Assuming miss Arial didn't kick them all off of her property for trespassing.

Papyrus gave himself a mental shake at the thought. He hadn't known her very long, but she didn't seem the sort of monster to kick people to the curb without hearing them out first. She'd agreed to let him and Sans stay, after all, and now there would be even  _ more  _ hands to help her rebuild her ancestral home, so that was a point in their favor, right?

A few steps in front of him, Sans paused and held up a hand for quiet. Papyrus stopped short and listened, pushing his short, dark hair up off of his brow where it had become plastered by the rain. The group hadn't been talking much anyways as they trudged through the dark, and they all strained to hear whatever had made Sans stop. After a moment, two men plunged through the thicket ahead of them, tumbling into a graceless heap as the larger of the two tackled the other and pinned him face-down in the earth before fishing blindly for something to strike his enemy across the back of the head with.

Just as the red headed man found a rock and raised it in the air, though, Rus pushed through the group from where he'd been at the rear and planted his boot in the middle of the man's chest, sending him toppling over backwards.

“Captain!” Rus said and hauled his brother up by the jacket even as the blond haired man started to push onto his hands and knees in anticipation of another attack.

“Sergeant,” the shorter man coughed then spat to the side to free his mouth from dirt. “About goddamn time; help me kill this cur so we can be on our way back the regiment,” he snarled as his brother released him and he gave himself a perfunctory dust off. He was looking rather the worse for wear, his military style wool coat splattered with mud and ripped at the seams in a few places; he had a bruise starting to bloom across one cheek under the crescent shaped scar that cut through his ruined right eye.

“Call me a cur again and I'll rip your fucking throat out,” the other man snarled as he got to his feet, blood oozing sluggishly from his temple and down the side of his face, making him a frightful sight as golden-brown eyes burned into the pair of brothers. He was just as muddied as the other man, so much so that only a few streaks of his violently red hair were visible.

“Know your place!” Rus' brother snapped and started towards him again, only to be brought up short by his brother's hand on his shoulder.

The blond narrowed his eyes back at him, and Rus said, “I've been doin' some recon, Captain, I think we've got bigger issues than mouthy strays.”

Rus watched as his brother eyed the peculiar group behind him and weighed his words. Across from them, the red haired man finally seemed to do the same, and only the sight of his own brother stepping forward brought him up short.

“Boss?” he asked, brow furrowed in confusion and annoyance as the taller man approached.

“There's definitely something...  _ strange  _ going on,” he admitted with a reluctant sneer back at the others. “For now we’ll hear them out,” Edge continued as he gave his brother a once over. “Also, you will answer to the name 'Red' for the time being.”

“What?” 'Red' asked. “What the fuck's wrong with 'Sans' now?”

“Half the people here are named Sans, that's what,” Sans himself said with a snort.

Before Red or anyone else could comment, a distant scream cut through the gentle patter of rainfall and made most of them jump.

“Who was that?” Blue asked, wide-eyed with horror from where he'd stepped in closer to his brother's side.

Stretch's eyes narrowed as he turned in the direction the sound seemed to have come from and remarked, “That's back the way we came, isn't it? Who else is-”

Heart suddenly pounding, Papyrus glanced around the group then turned to his brother, full of trepidation, and asked, “Sans, where's miss Arial?”

His brother gave a start at the question and quickly looked around as well, registering for the first time that he hadn't heard anything out of her for at least a few minutes. He'd thought she'd just been being quiet, but...

“You, wasn't she next to you? What happened?” He asked sharply, rounding on Rus who shrugged carelessly.

“Must've fallen behind,” he answered blandly. “Not my fault if the monster couldn't keep up.”

Fury sparked in his heart at the complete lack of concern in the other man's voice, but Papyrus' hand on his shoulder brought Sans up short from decking the other man outright. “We're going back to the house,” he ground out instead, then broke into a run back the way they'd come.

* * *

He was in the manor with her, Arial knew. She hadn't heard the front door go, so she could only assume he'd gone in through one of the windows. No doubt it had been faster and easier than going at the front door with that axe of his.

If she'd had lungs, the skeleton would have started hyperventilating when she started down one of the narrow hallways at the back of the manor in search of a hiding place, only for her stalker to step into view at the other end. He started towards her immediately, not quite running, but his stride quick and purposeful. Terror shooting up her spine, Arial spun on heel and darted back the way she'd come, then took the first turn she came to, wondering what her life had become that this was her second time that night being chased by a man with an axe.

At least the first time had just been a misunderstanding. No such luck this time, it seemed.

Realizing she recognized this particular stretch of hallway, Arial made a break for the basement door. She knew the top one didn't lock, but there was a lot of stuff down in Sans' lab, maybe she could find something to protect herself with, or hide until the others realized she was no longer with the group.

How long would that take, though, she wondered as she half ran, half fell down the spiral stairs in her hurry. Assuming they even decided to look for her, it could be they would stick to the forest and not come back to the house for hours...

Maybe the basement hadn't been such a great idea after all. She was utterly boxed in.

Knowing she had little other choice now, Arial dragged the door closed and then turned towards the pile of junk at the far end of the room with the intent of piling boxes and books in front of it to barricade herself in until help could arrive. Papyrus’ hurried entrance earlier that evening had shattered the lock-side of the frame, but the hinges were still in tact, which was better than nothing.

The robot was still there, sprawled gracelessly across the heap of stuff she'd knocked over earlier that night, its screen still dark. She ignored it in favor of the heavy looking boxes that surrounded it and reached out with her magic to grab one. Just as she started to turn and place it where she wanted, though, the door burst open and the axe wielding man stepped into the basement.

“G-Get away!” Arial shouted, horrified at how quickly he had found her. He must have been scant yards behind her on the stairs, she realized, and she hadn't heard so much as a  _ creak. _

He kept coming, though, so she waved a hand and launched the box at her would-be attacker, but he dodged it easily. Panic narrowing her field of vision, Arial took a step back even and grabbed another piece of debris then launched that too, only for him to sidestep again and keep coming.

Droplets of magic beading at her temples, Arial reflexively took a second step back as the man continued to approach, and immediately regretted it when she tripped over a stray book and went down with a cry. The landing hurt even more than she'd anticipated until the skeleton realized that she'd landed sprawled across the prone form of the robot, though she didn't give it more than a glance in the face of the man bearing down on her, axe gripped tight in one hand.

“Please, don't,” she said, reaching desperately for her magic. Panicked as she was, though, it slipped through her fingers like so much sand. He stopped in front of her and Arial tried to scramble back further onto the heap, but slipped against the robot's metal casing and wound up halfway in its lap as a result.

“Sorry,” the man said again as he watched her. “But I've got mouths to feed.”

The human raised his axe overhead in one fluid motion as he stared Arial down, expression dark and hard to read. The skeleton made one last attempt to push his soul away from her, but when her magic collided with it, it pulsed a bloody crimson that bled all the way up into his eyes and left it completely unaffected.

The axe dropped, blade a brilliant silver arc that Arial turned away from, burying her face in the shoulder of the robot rather than watch.

Something shifted beneath her, and behind Arial's head there was a dull thunk, followed by a grunt. When her end proved slow in coming, the skeleton slowly, hesitantly turned and looked at her attacker to see him standing just where he had been a moment before, the downward descent of his axe halted by a large, mechanical hand. Sockets as wide with shock as her would-be attacker's eyes were, Arial felt she must be dreaming as her eyelights trailed from the hand, up a long metal arm, to a fitfully flickering cracked television screen.

“Uh-” she said eloquently, completely dumbfounded.

The screen turned towards her then, and the skeleton wasn't sure how, but she could tell it was  _ looking  _ at her. Her attacker, meanwhile, hauled on the hilt of his axe in an attempt to free it from the robot's grasp, but the arm did not so much as twitch. Though they were broken and scattered, images flickered across the robot's screen, several of which included Arial herself from what must have been from its own point of view before going dark again.

“This guy bothering you, angel?” the robot asked unexpectedly in a pleasant, if slightly mechanical, baritone.

Feeling like her skull was full of static, Arial glanced back at the human who was pulling on his axe harder than ever now, to no avail, then looked at the robot again and said, “Um, yeah. He was-” the skeleton's words died and a slight tremor started in her hands as the night started catching up with her. “He was going to eat me, I think,” she managed to eek out finally, unconsciously tightening her grip on the robot's shoulder in an attempt to stifle her shaking.

His screen turned back to the man who went still, eyes still bright red, burning with a power that no human should have been capable of wielding. “Well, we can't have that, now can we?” the robot remarked, words bland and unconcerned, though there was a tension to his voice that sent a shiver up Arial's spine. He shifted his grip on the axe slightly, then wrenched it easily from its owner's grasp and cast it aside with such force that the blade went clean through the drywall and sank several inches into a wall stud.

The strange Sans stumbled back in his surprise. “What are you-” he started, but his words died off as the robot began to move again.

One of its long arms slipped down and around Arial, then lifted her easily into the air as it got to its feet and stepped free of the junk pile. The skeleton reflexively grabbed his shoulder to steady herself and wound up perched on his forearm like a child carried by its parent. A discarded black tarp caught on the machine's back and trailed behind it like some sort of cloak, but he paid it no mind for the moment, so neither did Arial.

The skeleton started to shift in her surprise at the sudden change in altitude, but when she realized how far down it was, she went still to save herself from getting dropped and potentially breaking an ankle.

“What are you doing?” she asked, voice gone high and thin in her surprise at this shift in circumstances. She was glad to apparently have a protector from the axe wielding human, but the robot had been distinctly... unstable earlier that evening and she wasn't sure how to take this change. Granted, his voice was normal now, and he seemed capable of stringing together coherent thoughts, so that had to be a good sign, right?

“Protecting you,” he replied, and while he had no facial features for her to read, she was pretty sure that was amusement she heard in his voice. “What's it look like?”

Arial's eye sockets widened fractionally and she felt a flush of magic color her cheekbones when he turned to look at her again. “I... well, yes; but why?”

Again there was a flicker of imagery across the robot's damaged screen, and this time,  _ all  _ of them were of her. “Because you protected me while I was malfunctioning despite not knowing who or what I was.” If he'd had a mouth, she was positive he'd have been been smiling when he added, “Like a real life guardian angel.”

Arial opened her mouth to speak, blush growing darker yet, but she couldn’t find the words to counter his statement. Before she could make a second attempt, however, the robot lifted his free hand, and the skeleton watched as it unfolded and shifted into a canon once more, the barrel aimed directly at her attacker. The human had moved while she (though apparently not her guardian) had been distracted, and now he stood frozen, fingers just shy of the hilt of his axe.

“Don’t even try it,” the robot said, screen turning towards the man, all humor gone from his voice.

Light began to bloom in the depths of the canon again, and Arial could see it reflected in her attacker’s eyes. There was panic there too, she realized distantly as she watched sweat trickle down his temple to bead at the corner of his jaw.

“Don’t,” she said suddenly, surprising herself with her vehemence and making the robot look around at her, clearly just as shocked. “Don’t kill him, please.”

“You said he tried to eat you!” her guardian said, screen flickering briefly as he lowered his canon a few inches, the light within it dimming.

“Well, yes,” Arial admitted with a pained grimace in the face of the bald truth. “But that doesn’t justify  _ us  _ trying to kill  _ him- _ ” she pressed on, then choked on her words as the killer in question snatched his axe out of the wall with inhuman strength and threw it one handed at the robot’s head.

There was a terrible crash and Arial flinched reflexively backwards, only barely managing to maintain her grip to keep from toppling to the ground. When she opened her eyes again a moment later, it was to see that the robot had just barely managed to lift his canon in time to block the projectile, which had, impossibly, lodged itself deep into the metal plating.

“Did I mention he can use magic?” Arial gasped.

“No, that would have been super great information to have thirty seconds ago, though!” the robot groused, then grunted and planted his feet when the axe began to glow red, then spun up and away, returning to its master’s hand and nearly taking his arm along with it. He swore as sparks flew from his damaged limb in its wake and returned to its normal form, though with none of the fluidity that had accompanied the initial transformation. “Still set on that ‘no killing’ rule, angel?” he grumbled as the human started towards them at a run.

“Y-yes!” she stammered, tightening her grip on him. 

“Better hold on, then,” he replied, sounding grim as he shifted his grip on the skeleton, tucking her up in both of his arms, directly in front of his chest, allowing him to curl around her as he dropped to the ground and rolled backwards to avoid the human’s first swing. Before he could make another, the robot jumped straight upward, body curved protectively over her as he broke clean through the ceiling and into the room above. 

The skeleton yelped in surprise and shut her eye sockets against the sudden onslaught of debris.

“You alright?” her companion asked as he landed on the floor and took a quick step back.

“Yeah, I think,” Arial answered, a little shaky, but truthful. “I-”

From up through the same hole they had just made, the human appeared, silhouetted in red and eyes blazing with Determination. He landed smoothly and closed the distance between them with a few quick steps that the robot immediately mirrored, neatly dodging his every swing, always shifting to keep Arial as far from the axe as possible.

“For fuck’s sake,” he snapped and sprang straight up again, putting a hole through another ceiling and taking them up to the second floor into what looked like some sort of sitting room. 

Arial didn’t have much time to take it in as the robot took one step back, waited until the human followed after again, then spun and snapped out a kick that caught their attacker in the torso and left the skeleton dizzy. The force of the blow sent the human flying into the nearest wall, but her companion didn’t wait to see if he got up, simply jumped again, taking them into a dark, cramped space with no windows. 

They weren’t there long as he jumped one more time, and suddenly they were outside, buffeted by wind and the remnants of stubborn rainfall. The brisk, fresh air was like a slap to Arial’s face and she gasped, feeling as though they hung in the sky for an impossibly long moment before falling once more.

“Sans!” the skeleton shouted reflexively when she looked down and saw their pursuer rushing up to meet them midair, though she wasn’t sure if she meant him, or the robot carrying her. 

“I see him,” the robot, who Arial was becoming increasingly convinced was  _ also  _ a Sans, said as he spun midair, the tarp that still clung to his back whipping noisily behind him. 

Blue-white light flashed somewhere in the vicinity of the robot’s feet and suddenly they were thrown sideways several feet just as the human swung his axe, slicing through the distracting swath of canvas and missing them entirely. The detached scrap was whipped away into the darkness by the wind as her protector landed in a crouch, feet skidding across the slick surface of the roof, the fingers of his damaged arm digging in for traction.

“I’m gonna have to put you down, angel,” the robot said as he stood again and they both watched their opponent land, struggling for purchase in the rain nearly as much as they had.

Arial nodded, but just as her companion started to do so, he twisted at the last moment to shield her once more. There was a sharp pinging sound as something bounced off his back, then tangled itself in his accidental cape, and the skeleton’s eye sockets went wide when he reached back and produced an arrow as long as her arm.

“He has a brother with a bow, too,” she added meekly as the robot twisted to look over the edge of the roof while he carefully shifted her from his good arm to his damaged one.

Despite not having a nose, her companion snorted then lifted his newly freed hand and sited on the man Arial could only just make out through the dark on the ground several stories below. “I just had to pick miss popular,” he mused as this arm too proved capable of shifting into a canon, though it looked different from its counterpart. Before she could tell him not to kill anyone again, he added, “Don’t worry, he’s too far for it to do real damage,” then fired off a series of shots that boomed deafeningly across the lawn. 

Rather than light, this canon seemed to produce some sort of sonic pulse that was enough to leave marks in the lawn despite the distance. Unfortunately, rather than run away, the dark Papyrus rushed towards the house, then gathered himself and _jumped._ Purple light gathered around him as he did, and he soared skyward, passing the edge of the roof and hitting the apex of his arc just as his brother lunged to close the distance between all of them.

Arial watched them come, frozen in the robot’s grip until she was suddenly forced to cling for dear life as he too took to the air, passing the Papyrus in a blur, then spinning hard and fast to kick him in the back, slamming the tall man face first into the roof with a grunt. Before they’d even started to fall, Arial watched as her companion kicked out behind him just in time to catch the Sans in the chest with a foot, sending him sliding across the roof until he nearly toppled off the far end.

They landed and immediately took off in a mad dash, arriving just in time to grab Sans by the ankle and drag him back from the edge. The robot immediately released him, however, and took several quick steps back when the man came up swinging.

“That’s enough, you fucking lunatic!” the robot snapped furiously, good arm reflexively curling around Arial as well on the off chance one of the human’s swings went wide.

“You don’t need her!” the man shouted back as he got unsteadily to his feet, looking drained and exhausted, but as determined as ever even as his magic faded. “You don’t even eat! So just leave her and-”

“Sans!”

“Not now, Pap,” he growled, taking a step forward towards the robot, the head of his axe dragging across the roof tiles, handle still gripped tight in one hand.

The robot took an equal step back turning so he could keep both brothers in his sights, but before he could say anything, Papyrus shouted again and pointed into the distance. “But Sans,  _ look! _ ”

Curious, Arial looked at the tall man and saw him seated on the roof to their left, pointing towards the distant horizon where the clouds were beginning to clear at long last, and the first rays of dawn were beginning to shine through, illuminating the fading rainfall and making the world glitter. Sans too was looking she realized after a quick glance in his direction, and she watched as the axe dropped from his hand, hitting the roof with a dull thunk.

“What is it?” Papyrus asked, voice full of wonderment that made both Arial and her robot companion look at him in surprise.

“It’s the sun,” his brother replied, voice rough with emotion, eyes wide and their natural hazel once more. “It’s the sun,” he repeated more quietly to himself, as though disbelieving his own words even as he dropped onto his backside, fight completely forgotten in the growing light of dawn. He looked around him, seeming to really take in his surroundings for the first time and he seemed so lost in that moment that Arial could feel nothing but pity for him.

Sans’ attention remained fixed on the horizon as she tapped her robot companion on the shoulder and motioned for him to let her down. He hesitated until she gave him a reassuring smile, and after a moment he carefully placed her on her feet, one hand on her back until he was certain she wasn’t going to slip.

“Thanks,” she murmured to him, then carefully made her way across the roof to her one time attacker. Not wanting to loom, Arial seated herself an arm’s length away from the man and remained quiet for a time before saying, “You’re on the surface. I think my… my  _ tenant’s  _ weird, interdimensional machine brought you here by accident.” He turned and looked at her, picking distractedly at the scars above his hairline, a hard to read expression on his face. “There’s plenty of food here, by the way,” she added nervously when he continued silent. “So you don’t need to, you know…  _ eat  _ me.”

The man’s brow furrowed, then quirked as he tried not to smile, as if he couldn’t quite make up his mind on how to respond. Before he could, there was a shout from behind them as Sans’ voice, the original Sans’ voice, echoed up from the hole in the roof.

“Arial! You up there?!”

“Yeah, I’m alright!” she called back, then looked at the Sans she was rapidly coming to think of as ‘Axe’, as if asking him if this were going to continue to be the case. He arched one expressive brow, and it was enough for her to say, “Yeah, we’re fine, I think.”

“You  _ think _ ?” the man below muttered, then said something else she couldn’t hear. 

A moment later, his head appeared over through the hole in the roof, and Arial could only assume he’d found something to climb on to allow him even that much. “That’s  _ really  _ not convincing, kid.”

Axe stared at the man, then glanced back at her and jerked his thumb in the direction of his doppelganger. “Who the fuck is that?”

Arial threw her head back and laughed, the weight and the stress of the chaotic night seeming to lift off her narrow shoulders as she did, leaving her light headed with relief. She smiled at Axe then, and said, “He’s you. Wanna meet him?”

The man at her side gave Sans a skeptical look, though Sans himself was looking at the robot, who approached her again now and offered the skeleton a hand up. Still smiling, she beamed up into his cracked screen and accepted, allowing him to pull her easily to her feet once more.

“He’s you too, I think. You’re a Sans as well, aren’t you?”

“Got it in one, angel,” the robot mused as Axe’s Papyrus finally made it to his feet and moved to help his brother up as well. He released her hand, then reached up and brushed a few stray raindrops from her cheek and said, “You can call me Q, though.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Q,” Arial said and offered him her hand, this time to shake. “I’m Arial.”

He glanced down at it, then chuckled and accepted, his much larger hand engulfing hers as he took it and gave it a gentle shake. “The pleasure’s all mine.”

“Well, are they alive or not?” demanded an unfamiliar voice from below.

“They’re fine, I think!” answered Blue. Someone just out of hearing spoke, then Blue replied, “Don’t be rude!”

Arial’s smile turned wry and she looked around at those on the roof with her and said, “Well, who wants breakfast? I don’t think I can wrap my poor mind around any interdimensional science mumbo-jumbo until I’ve eaten.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again for reading! Make sure to leave a comment and let me know what your favorite part was!


	5. Thirteen

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to the temporary final chapter! I definitely plan to write more of this, but I'll be taking a break to work on some other stuff for awhile before coming back to it eventually. Please don't ask for updates, they'll come when they come and asking only makes me work slower. If you want to encourage me, however, please leave a comment and tell me your favorite part, I love hearing that and it really helps me keep writing!

The kitchen was an utter mess, but, Arial thought as she stood over the hot stove and watched her pancake cook, at least no one was trying to kill each other anymore.

It was such a low hurdle to clear, and yet the group of men at her back had managed to nearly stumble over it on several occasions that night. To be fair, she thought, all but two of them had woken up on the wrong side of reality, let alone the wrong side of the bed. That kind of confusion was bound to bring out the worst in people.

“I got this, you should go eat too,” said a voice behind (and above) her. 

Arial glanced back over her shoulder and found her vision dominated by a metallic chest plate. She tilted her head back and smiled up into Q’s still cracked screen and said, “Oh, I can get it. You should...” she hesitated then. The skeleton had been about to tell him to eat as well, but now that she thought about it, he didn’t even have a mouth. “Um, do you  _ need  _ to eat?”

“No,” he answered, clearly amused as he lifted the spatula from her hand and gently, but firmly pushed her back towards the table. “Hence why  _ you  _ should be the one sitting and eating.”

The robot finished off the pancake she’d been working on, then slid it onto a plate and put it in her hands. Well, she  _ was  _ hungry, and honestly, she couldn’t argue with Q’s logic. Plus, the robot had already turned back to the stove and was making more pancakes for the rest of the crew with quick, efficient motions that told her he knew precisely what he was doing. Why a robot knew how to make pancakes was beyond her, but…

“Oh, Arial, sit over here!” Blue exclaimed and patted the open seat next to him.

The group of men had all gathered around the small table that served as Papyrus and Sans’ all purpose kitchen table, though half of them had their plates in their laps thanks to the lack of surface area. Mismatched chairs of varying age and finery had been dragged in from other parts of the house, and Arial was more than a little relieved when her own didn’t creak or make any other alarming sounds when she settled into it.

“Syrup?” the friendly man asked with a smile as he offered her the bottle, which she readily accepted and applied liberally to her pancake.

The skeleton tucked in and glanced around at the rather motley crew as she ate. Each man was seated next to his brother, with Arial herself squeezed in between Sans and Blue.

Most of them were focused on their food, but when her eyes met those of Rus' brother, she found him staring right back at her. The intensity of his gaze almost made her start, and while his expression was difficult to read, it was obvious he had no friendly inclination towards her. She wasn't surprised, considering how his brother had reacted on realizing she was a monster. It made her wonder what their reality was like that her simply being a monster was enough to react with violence before she so much as got a word out. 

One without the peaceful resolution her's had only recently achieved, apparently.

Eventually, the man looked away when Axe accidentally bumped him, leaving Arial feeling somehow drained. The skeleton chewed absently on a mouthful of pancake, then leaned over towards Blue, who seemed to have the best handle on everyone thus far and asked, “Rus' brother, what nickname did he choose?”

The man next to her blinked, then swallowed his own mouthful and said, “Black,” then gestured subtly towards the man seated next to Edge and added, “and that's Red.” Arial tried to suppress a smile at their color themed names and Blue just laughed, “I know. Edge picked his brother's name, but Black chose his own, so,” he shrugged, seeming more amused than anything. “Maybe we should have called  _ him  _ Edge instead.”

Arial snorted and choked back a laugh that earned her a few looks, but luckily no comments.

Unlike Black, Red paid Arial no attention at all when she glanced his way, focused as he was on his food. He took oversized bites like a man who'd gone too long between meals. Unlike the more gaunt looking Axe, however, neither Red nor his brother looked starved in the literal sense. Despite that, however, Arial could tell they were used to going without by the carefully guarded way they both ate, one arm resting on the table in front of their plate while they hunched over it to make the distance their fork had to travel as short as possible.

Everyone was still a mess after their romp through the woods, but Red seemed to have born the worst of it, with Black close behind. The man was still covered in mud, the crimson of his hair only obvious in streaks where he had attempted to wipe it it clean with his hands. His heavy, battered looking leather jacket still bore spatters of earth as well, and for the first time Arial realized that he wasn't wearing a shirt under it, making her wonder if it had been ruined in the fight, or if he'd simply not been wearing one from the start.

“If you're gonna stare, at least make yourself fuckin' useful and pass the syrup,” Red said unexpectedly as he looked up and caught her eyes with his, irises a rich, golden-brown Arial hadn't realized even occurred in humans.

Taken off guard as she was, the skeleton just stared, fork halfway to her mouth as a look of annoyance flashed across the man's face. A low growl escaped him as he leaned across the table and snatched the syrup from where she'd left it in front of her plate and proceeded to pour more of it across his pancakes before passing it on to his brother. “Worthless,” he grumbled under his breath.

Arial flushed, embarrassed by her slip, but before she could apologize, Sans snapped, “Watch your mouth, Red. You don't have any room to be disrespecting her.”

“I don't respect people who ain't earned it,” Red countered with a sneer that revealed two rows of unnaturally sharp teeth. They looked more like they belonged in the mouth of a shark than that of the man across the table from her.

One of them was gold.

“This is her house, so maybe try some manners on for size before you wind up back out in the rain.”

Red's amber gaze drifted to Arial again, a speculative, if sour, expression on his face while he chewed a mouthful of pancake. He swallowed, then said, “Pretty shit house, though. 's full of holes.”

The skeleton's blush deepened at his observation and she couldn't hold back an exclamation of, “No thanks to you!” The man's heavy brows went up at her outburst, a smirk tugging at his lips as she hurriedly continued, “Besides, I only just inherited the place. I came out here to see what it was going to take to restore it.”

“I don't care about this pathetic, derelict excuse for an abode,” Black cut in as he set his fork down on his plate with a sharp clink that cut through the general chatter. He regarded everyone else gathered around the table for a moment through narrowed eyes before continuing, “We were promised answers if we went with you and these...” here the blond leveled a look of pure disdain at Edge and Red that made the brothers bristle visibly. “-lowlifes.”

There was a flurry of movement as Edge and Red lunged across the table, clearly intent on attacking Black and Rus who were already moving as well. Before anyone could lay hands on one another, however, the blade of a too familiar fire axe buried its blade in the surface of the table between the two factions, only barely avoiding taking off several fingers on both sides.

Axe was on his feet, one dark hand still wrapped around the handle of his weapon, eyes wide and grin frighteningly manic as he said into the silence that followed, “Anyone' fucks up this spread loses six inches, I don’t care where from.”

Everyone was very still for a long minute, and it seemed to Arial that Red, Edge, Black, and Rus were all weighing their chances of making a second aggressive move without losing something valuable. Eventually, after determining that Axe was the only one armed at the table, they all backed down into their seats once more. Axe himself followed suit after a moment, but left his weapon buried in the tabletop before setting about eating once more.

Beside her, Blue released a breath he'd likely been holding since the start of the argument, and Arial flashed him a sympathetic smile while, beside him, Stretch relaxed by degrees.

Papyrus cleared his throat and pushed out of his chair, drawing all eyes to him as he stood. “I'm going to make some tea.”

A soft huff escaped Sans, but when Arial glanced at him, she couldn't make heads or tails of the odd half-smile he wore. She did, however, note the sweat starting to bead at his temples, just below his hairline. Instinctively, she reached out to him and gently laid a hand on his shoulder, smiling when he turned to look at her. Behind them, Papyrus was quietly speaking to Q while the robot cooked, but Arial couldn't make out the words.

“Yeah,” Sans said eventually as he leaned back in his chair and pushed his plate away, despite there still being half a pancake on it. Without so much as a by-your-leave, Axe immediately grabbed it and pushed it towards his brother, who tried to refuse, only to have it dumped unceremoniously onto his plate. Sans didn't object, just continued, “if you guys can refrain from violence for two minutes together, I should be able to make an educated guess about what happened.”

“Guesses aren't good enough,” Edge growled, eyes narrowed from where he sat, ramrod straight, in his chair. Beside him, Red had slouched backwards, plate clean as he kept a wary eye on Black and Rus.

“Well too damn bad, princess,” Sans said, sounding more tired than annoyed as he dragged a hand down his face. “Guesses are all I've got.”

There was a mutter of discontentment at this from all sides, and worried that chaos was about to break out again, Arial spoke up. “Please, don't take it out on Sans, it was my fault.” All eyes immediately snapped to her and it took everything in the skeleton not to flinch visibly in response. “I accidentally turned on the machine before it was ready. It was just a stupid, clumsy mistake, I'm sorry.”

Sans glanced at her, surprised at how readily Arial shouldered the blame. What she said was true, of course, but considering what she'd already seen of the men around the table, he wouldn't have blamed her if she'd done otherwise. Hell, two of them had tried to  _ eat  _ her already that evening, and at least two others were violently anti-monster...

“The machine was originally designed by Pap and I's brother,” Sans said before anyone could comment, unwilling to let the monster throw herself  _ too  _ far under the bus for the evening's mishap. After all, if he and Papyrus hadn't been squatting in her family's home, she never would have accidentally activated the machine in the first place. “It was meant to open a doorway to another universe, but when he first tested it, it went awry and dragged him into the void between realities instead, as far as I can tell,” he explained quietly. As he did so, Papyrus returned with an armful of mugs and placed them in the center of the table, along with what appeared to be a genuine teapot bearing a pretty floral pattern. Q followed along after with a pan full of sizzling bacon, which he forked onto people's plates while they listened, though only a few availed themselves of the tea.

When he reached Sans, though, the man waved the robot on and continued speaking. “The machine was damaged in the process, so I've been trying to repair it ever since in hopes of rescuing him. I brought it here to work because it's remote enough that no one but us would get hurt if it decided to blow up again.” He glanced sidelong at Arial and smiled wryly when he added, “Didn't figure the owner would show up before I was done, especially after a year. Arial accidentally turned the machine on, and it being half finished, instead of opening a door to the void, it pulled all of you through into this reality.”

“Leave it to the monster to fuck up the latest in human innovation,” Rus drawled and kicked back in his seat as a sneer pulled at the corner of his brother's mouth. Their mood didn't last long, however, as Q 'accidentally' bumped into Rus' chair and sent the man toppling to the kitchen floor.

“Oops,” the robot drawled on his way to dump his pan into the sink. “Sorry.”

Blue clapped a hand over his mouth to prevent a laugh from escaping him while Stretch rubbed absently at his jaw in an attempt to disguise a smile as Rus rolled away from his chair into a seated position. Red had none of the others reservation and laughed out loud, slapping the table while a smirk pulled at edge's lips.

“Are you alright?” Axe's brother asked the other man, sounding genuinely concerned as he offered him a hand. Rus ignored it in favor of getting to his feet under his own power, then righted his chair and sat again.

“Watch your step, you bucket of bolts,” he said without looking back at Q, who seemed un-bothered by the threat.

“You'd probably be better served watching your own, rather than warning me,” the robot countered, sounding bored as he scrubbed a pan. “I'm not the one that wound up on the floor, after all.”

“How about we all just... get back to the topic at hand,” Papyrus suggested before Rus could snipe back.

Arial, however, had her eyes on Axe's brother, whose name she realized she had never actually gotten. Noting that his plate was clean she offered him her last piece of bacon and asked, “Did you want this? I'm not hungry enough to eat it myself.”

The man looked up at her, hazel eyes widening fractionally at her offer. He pushed a few of his long, thin braids back from his face and glanced sidelong as his brother. Axe was, Arial realized, watching her closely even as he chewed on a strip of bacon himself. He didn't say anything, but his gaze went back to his plate and his brother seem to take this as an okay.

“Thank you,” the man said, smiling behind the cover of the cloth mask that covered the lower half of his face. The fabric was black with a bright, white, toothy smile painted on. He accepted her offering and tugged down the mask as he brought the strip of bacon to his mouth. On doing so, Arial finally saw why he must wear the thing; his lips and the surrounding skin were a mass of scar tissue. The man let his long, braided hair fall forward as he ate, hiding most of his face from view.

After a moment, the skeleton asked, “I didn't catch your nickname earlier, what do you like to go by?”

He glanced up at her again as he finished eating and pulled his mask back into place. “Crooks is fine,” the human answered. His brother shot him a displeased look that made Arial wonder just what the meaning behind the nickname was, but the expression was quickly masked when 'Crooks' continued speaking in a quiet, sincere tone. “I'm sorry about earlier. We don't  _ like  _ to... well-”

“It's alright,” Arial answered quickly, figuring it was better to let bygones be bygones than to dwell on the matter considering they'd all be living together for the foreseeable future. “As long as you don't try it again,” she added with a weak laugh.

“Oh no, of course not!” Crooks said quickly, “We-”

“Bro,” Axe said, cutting off his brother with a word and a look.

Crooks looked at the other man, expression hard to read behind his half-mask. “I'm sure she'd understand, Sans. Miss Arial seems very-”

“Doesn't matter,” Axe countered sharply then turned his attention to Sans and Arial. In the process, the skeleton noticed for the first time that the man's left eye seemed to be permanently dilated. “So basically what you’re saying is that we all wound up here because  _ you two  _ fucked up.”

Arial flinched at his phrasing and Sans' mouth twisted, clearly displeased but unable to argue. “Basically.”

“Then what's the plan. What are you going to do about it?”

Axe glanced around the table as he spoke, and it was clear that despite all their many differences in opinion and temperament, the others were wondering the same thing.

Arial opened her mouth to speak, then hesitated and closed it again as she looked at Sans, same as everyone else. Even his brother shot him a questioning look as sweat began to bead at The man’s temple again under the weight of so many eyes.

“Killing us would be most practical. It'd be easy enough to hide a bunch of bodies back in those trees. Having us around is a problem,” Edge said, eyes narrowed as he stared Sans down from across the table.

The man flinched visibly at the suggestion. “What? I'm not killing anyone,” he objected. “That's  _ insane. _ ” Luckily, as crazy as the suggestion was, it seemed to be enough to shock the human out of his indecision. “You're going to stay here,” he continued firmly, brow furrowing as he spoke. “As long as that's okay with you; just until I can get the machine fixed,” Sans added a moment later when he looked at Arial, frown deepening.

He was worried she'd say no, the skeleton realized with some surprise. “Yes, of course!” she hurriedly answered. “I mean, this is at least half my fault, so it's the least I can do.” Her eyes went to the other men, however, and added, “As long as you guys promise not to put any more holes in my house, of course. It's already falling apart as is, it doesn't need any help. I'm trying to  _ fix  _ it.”

“Of course!” Blue agreed readily beside her and his brother nodded in agreement. Papyrus beamed at them, though besides Crooks, none of the other men seemed particularly eager to agree.

After a moment's consideration, though, Axe shrugged and nodded as he shoved his last bite of pancake into his mouth. “Easy enough. It's a pretty big place, should be big enough we can spread out and not get under each other's skin,” he added with a sideways glance at Red and Edge.

Sans relaxed a little and remarked. “Alright. In the meantime, I'll take a look at the machine and see what kind of damage we did.” The man sighed tiredly and rubbed absently at his eyes while Q finally returned to the table with a second pan full of bacon and started to dish it out, missing the way Axe glanced sharply in his direction and then away again.

“We're lucky, in a way,” the robot mused as he worked. “What are the odds you'd happen to set up shop in a mansion big enough to accommodate thirteen people comfortably?”

The comment went over most people's head's without thought, but Stretch glanced around the table with one brow arched. When no one else commented, he said, “Am I the only one concerned that the  _ robot  _ apparently can't count?”

“The hell is a robot?” Red asked as Q paused and looked around the room again.

“ _ That's  _ a robot?! _ ”  _ Black demanded, seeming truly surprised for the first time since being dragged over the edge of a cliff earlier that evening.

The robot in question seemed to take an oddly long moment processing before dumping a strip of bacon onto Stretch's plate and asking, “Who was it that hit me in the head with a pipe again?”

Blue choked on a bite of his breakfast and Stretch flinched a little, then wisely decided to say no more on the subject.

“Okay but what the fuck is a robot,” Red repeated, louder this time.

“An automaton. A metal man that runs on electricity or magic but has no mind of its own,” Rus explained, leaning back in his chair again as he watched Q push three strips of bacon onto Axe and then Crook's plates, apparently thinking they needed it more than anyone else. “Never seen one that fancy before, though.”

Edge was staring at Q as well and finally asked, “So that’s... not a man in armor?”

Everyone turned to look at Red and Edge, and then back at Q, who had moved to place the frying pan in the sink. When he turned again to see everyone looking at him, his screen flickered briefly before going dark once more, though Arial wasn’t sure as to the cause. Her eye sockets went wide when the robot lifted his right hand to his left shoulder and gripped it tight. There was a soft whirring sound, and then he pulled his arm clean out of the joint and used it to point directly at Rus, the detached limb managing to point despite being disconnected.

“Actually, I’m a hyper-advanced digital sentience inhabiting a mechanical body,” he explained, then reattached his arm with a click and another whir. Q rolled it experimentally to make sure it was seated properly and straightened when it proved to be so.

When half the room only stared at the robot blankly, Sans finally said, “He’s an artificial intelligence.”

“If you want to be boring about it, yes.”

“That’s amazing!” Papyrus exclaimed, clearly delighted by this turn of events. “We don’t have anything like that here,” he added after a moment’s thought, then turned to his brother and said, “Maybe he can help you with the machine!”

Sans and Q shared a look, each seeming to size the other up. Or, rather, Sans sized Q up while Q’s monitor turned in the human’s general direction. It wasn’t easy to tell what he was looking at given he had a television for a head.

“Maybe,” the man agreed eventually before turning to the rest of the table and noticing that most of them were starting to seriously drift. Red looked as though he were nursing a headache, and his brother was scowling into the middle distance, as if he disapproved of the world at large but simply didn’t have the energy to voice his complaints aloud. Crooks and Axe had cleaned their plates while Blue leaned heavily against Stretch’s shoulder, eyelids starting to sag despite his obvious interest in what was going on around him. Sans was half convinced Stretch himself was already asleep, and Rus didn’t look much better despite the way Black kept giving him the occasional poke in the ribs.

The man looked at Arial last, and she offered him a weak smile as she came to the same conclusion he obviously had. “How about we all clean up and find rooms for the night,” she suggested to the group at large. “We can always talk more when we’re all more coherent.”

“Yeah,” Sans agreed with a tired sigh as he ran a hand absently through his dark, messy curls. “Yeah,” he repeated, then turned towards his brother, who was already moving and encouraging the others to their feet. Q stood nearby, posture thoughtful (or so Sans guessed), and after a moment’s consideration, Sans asked, “You uh… need a place to plug in or something?”

The robot looked his direction, and Sans got the impression he would have blinked if he’d had eyes. “No,” Q answered, humor obvious in voice, as though the man had said something funny. He glanced around the many candles that illuminated the room and remarked, “If anything, it looks like you might need to plug things into  _ me. _ ” He might have said more, but movement by the door made him, then Arial and Sans, look around.

Axe stood there, seeming to hesitate uncertainly until they turned in his direction and noticed him looking. The man opened his mouth to speak, then apparently thought better of it and frowned as he too disappeared out the kitchen door in search of his brother. They could hear the others already moving through the house, looking for suitable places to sleep that weren’t  _ too  _ full of dust and debris, leaving Arial, Sans, and Q standing in silence.

Eventually, Q said, “You two get some sleep. I’ll keep an eye on them.”

Sans shot the robot a skeptical look but Arial immediately frowned in concern. “Don’t you need to rest too?”

“It’s good to shut down for a couple of hours a night, but I can go a few days without just fine,” Q reassured her. He reached out and the skeleton was surprised when he brushed his long, mechanical fingers across the crown of her skull almost affectionately. “You’re cute when you worry, but don’t do it too much, huh?”

The robot left before she could get so much as a word out, “Uh,” was all she managed, but he was already gone, so she turned to Sans with a helpless expression.

His features were difficult to read, but she thought that might be amusement lingering in his dark eyes as he looked at her. He felt conflicted about trusting the robot any more than the others, but all things considered, it seemed to be their best option at the moment. “Sorry,” he said eventually, feeling lame even as the word escaped him. “For all this, I mean,” he struggled to clarify with a vague wave of a hand, seeming to imply the situation at large.

A soft, tired laugh escaped the skeleton and she smiled ruefully at him. “We’ll stop apologizing to each other for it eventually, right? I still feel awful; those poor men...”

“Maybe someday,” Sans said, a small smile tugging at one corner of his mouth. “But probably not for awhile yet.” She nodded thoughtfully and they were quiet for a time, listening to the gentle creaks and groans of a house suddenly occupied after so long left empty. “You should grab your bag and take one of the rooms closer to Pap and I’s,” he said abruptly into the quiet. Arial looked at him in question, and he pressed, “Some of these guys seem alright, but...”

The skeleton opened her mouth to object on their behalf, but memory of the hateful look Rus had given her earlier that evening, and the bullet holes he and the others had left in the walls of her family’s home returned to plague her. “Alright,” she agreed finally. Arial barely knew Sans any better than the others, but, for whatever reason, she trusted him anyways.

Beside her, Sans relaxed a little, relieved he wouldn’t have to argue with the monster. He felt bad enough about everything she’d been through that evening thanks to him and his machine without her winding up eaten or murdered in her sleep on top of it.

The early morning light pouring in through the kitchen windows behind them warmed Arial’s back as she stretched, then dropped her hands to her sides. “Geeze, I feel like I could sleep for a year,” she said as she started towards the door, Sans on her heels.

“I’ll sleep like the  _ dead  _ myself,” he mused, a lopsided grin taking over his features when she shot him a look over her shoulder.

“Ha ha  _ ha,  _ very funny, Sans.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's it for now! Obviously there's still _a lot_ to be addressed regarding the baggage resulting from everyone's actions on their first meeting, as well as backstory on each of their realities... but you'll just have to wait til next chapter, lol. I wanted to keep this first section fairly concise, but no worries, it WILL all be addressed in time!  
>  Until then, please don't ask for updates, they'll come when they come and asking only makes me work slower. If you want to encourage me, however, please leave a comment and tell me your favorite part, I love hearing that and it really helps me keep writing!

**Author's Note:**

> Well, hope you guys enjoyed! Just so you know, **this story will initially be five chapters long**. I plan on writing more than that eventually, but there'll be a pause as I go and get caught up on 'Skeleton ex Machina' and get some more work done on my novel, lol.  
>  Don't forget to follow me over at [jolie-in-the-underground](http://jolie-in-the-underground.tumblr.com/) on tumblr for updates and also art! I've already [done headshots](https://jolie-in-the-underground.tumblr.com/post/174400205155/youre-a-real-handful-kid-you-know-that) of most of the guys if you want to see what they look like!


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